GoboLinux [LWN.net]

GoboLinux

Posted Jan 11, 2008 3:09 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: GoboLinux by cdmiller
Parent article: GoboLinux

There's even software to manage this for you.  See http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ for
example.

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GoboLinux

Posted Jan 12, 2008 1:16 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I have a substantial pile of patches for this (speedups, optionally 
trading speed against unstow accuracy, that sort of thing) and it seems to 
be unmaintained. I'll probably put them up somewhere soon.

GNU Stow

Posted Jan 12, 2008 17:00 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Have you tried contacting the FSF?  If no one is maintaining it they're probably looking for
volunteers...

GNU Stow

Posted Jan 13, 2008 18:28 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I may well do that, but I have to switch jobs first, to one whose lawyers 
don't just *sit* on the FSF's legal paperwork and then deny they ever 
received it when contacted.

Bah.

epkg

Posted Jan 14, 2008 1:24 UTC (Mon) by patha (subscriber, #6986) [Link]

I tested GNU Stow many years ago, but found epkg (http://encap.org/epkg/) to be better. I
still find epkg to be an indispensable tool for "local" software.

epkg

Posted Jan 14, 2008 20:32 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It seems good at first, but it's a classic example of bundling too much 
into one package. Many of its features would better be placed in a build 
system wrapped around encap; e.g. downloading and running autoconf have 
*no* place in a symlink-creator. Transaction logging is also completely 
out of place there.

I have something better (the only feature it's missing is the 
autodownloading and it has *many* features above and beyond encap) and (to 
quote corbet) as soon as I've cleaned it up I'll be releasing it. :)

(However, there'll be a public git repo in a matter of weeks, not years!)