From owner-freebsd-ports  Mon Mar 29 23:57:59 1999
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Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:56:46 +0100
From: nclayton@lehman.com
To: ports@freebsd.org
Cc: nik@freebsd.org
Subject: GNU Stow, and the ports system?
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Folks,

Chaps,

[ not on -ports, please cc: replies to me ]

Has anyone looked at GNU Stow? 

    http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual.html

Basically, it lets you install applications in to their own directories
hierarchies (/path/to/perl/bin, /path/to/perl/man, /path/to/perl/lib, and
so on) and then manages the creation of symlinks from these directories 
into somewhere like /usr/local/.  It handles the case where two applications
try and install binaries (or other files) with the same name.

So all your programs stay separate, but your $PATH doesn't grow 
inordinately long.  I've used (and written) similar software myself, but
never seriously with FreeBSD.

It occurs to me that this could be used with the ports system quite nicely.
Something like (untested);

    # cd /usr/ports/textproc/jade
    # make
    # make PREFIX=/opt/\$DISTNAME install

which would install Jade in to /opt/jade-1.2.1/{bin,man,lib}, followed by

    # cd /opt
    # stow jade-1.2.1

to make the symlinks as necessary.  Removing an installed package is then
done by

    # cd /opt
    # stow -D jade-1.2.1
    # pkg_delete jade-1.2.1

Now, obviously I could just do this myself (and probably will when my 
3.1 box finishes rebuilding itself).  But would anyone be interested in
having this functionality folded back into the ports system as an option?

Perhaps a "USE_STOW" knob in /etc/make.conf, which would modify the
"install" and "deinstall" targets to have the above behaviour?

If people are interested, I'll get to work on patches.

A hunt through the -ports archives show that this has been mentioned 
once before, in October last year,

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=307914+311440+/usr/local/www/db/text/1998/freebsd-ports/19981004.freebsd-ports

but there doesn't seem to have been any real discussion about it.

N
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