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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] New package: stow
Schulman.Andrew@epamail.epa.gov wrote:
The stow package is now available in the Cygwin distribution. Stow is an
installation manager for local software packages. It creates sets of
symlinks from the installed location (e.g. /usr/local) to a stow directory
(e.g. /usr/local/stow/emacs) where the real files live. This allows you to
keep packages separate, while making them appear to be installed in the
same place.
Note that because stow uses symlinks to install files, it will probably
only be effective for software that is used only in the Cygwin environment
and doesn't install any DLLs. The reason is that Cygwin symlinks are
implemented in the Windows file system as shortcuts (.lnk files), but
Windows shortcuts are fundamentally broken: Windows will not, as a rule
(the only exception being for GUI operations in Windows Explorer),
interpret a shortcut as a pointer to a file. Cygwin corrects this and
emulates the Unix behavior, but Windows programs won't, and PATH searches
for DLLs won't follow shortcuts either.
Does stow have support for hard links at all? If not is that an easy
thing to add in? Such an option would make stow more useful on Cygwin, IMHO.
Chris
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