4 ms·

I fail to see how this comes with the convenience of directory-specific symbolic links, dotfile-specific backups, individual removal & replacement of dotfiles,

I fail to see how this comes with the convenience of directory-specific symbolic links, dotfile-specific backups, individual removal & replacement of dotfiles, etc etc. I've been using stow for years to manage my dotfiles and it's never been more involved than $ stow dotfiles/urxvt or what have you. In fact I would say that managing a git repository is more of a waste of time and far more over-engineered for a task easily solved by a tiny binary. Not sure what you're referring to by an 'install script', have you ever used stow? In any case, the real answer is that you should be using whatever works best for your use case, and for me that's stow.

pmoriarty 11y ago
That does not work for me. When I try "stow foo/bar" I get this error: Undefined subroutine &main::error called at /usr/bin/stow line 568, <DATA> line 18. where line 568 of /usr/bin/stow is: error("Slashes are not permitted in package names"); What version of stow do you have? I'm using stow 2.2.0-r2 on Gentoo Linux.
- dbbolton 11y ago
  From the documentation page: >A package directory is the root of a tree containing the installation image for a particular package. Each package directory must reside in a stow directory — e.g., the package directory /usr/local/stow/perl must reside in the stow directory /usr/local/stow. The name of a package is the name of its directory within the stow directory — e.g., perl. https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html The article in the OP also doesn't use this format. Instead it's prefaced with a `cd` command, so you would need to do: cd foo; stow bar
- corndoge 11y ago
  I use xstow, which permits slashes; usually I do just cd into the dotfiles directory and stow out from there (otherwise you need to specify a target directory) but I left that part out for brevity.

pmoriarty 11y ago

That does not work for me. When I try "stow foo/bar" I get this error: Undefined subroutine &main::error called at /usr/bin/stow line 568, <DATA> line 18. where line 568 of /usr/bin/stow is: error("Slashes are not permitted in package names"); What version of stow do you have? I'm using stow 2.2.0-r2 on Gentoo Linux.

dbbolton 11y ago
From the documentation page: >A package directory is the root of a tree containing the installation image for a particular package. Each package directory must reside in a stow directory — e.g., the package directory /usr/local/stow/perl must reside in the stow directory /usr/local/stow. The name of a package is the name of its directory within the stow directory — e.g., perl. https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html The article in the OP also doesn't use this format. Instead it's prefaced with a `cd` command, so you would need to do: cd foo; stow bar
corndoge 11y ago
I use xstow, which permits slashes; usually I do just cd into the dotfiles directory and stow out from there (otherwise you need to specify a target directory) but I left that part out for brevity.