I've seen this post on hackernews a few times now (as dang diligently pointed out). However, typically they don't mention that more recent versions of Stow act

I've seen this post on hackernews a few times now (as dang diligently pointed out). However, typically they don't mention that more recent versions of Stow actually have specific functionality for dotfiles, which is support for the `dot-` prefix. Check the man page for your version of stow. If the string "dot-" doesn't appear anywhere, you have an old version of stow. Also interesting to me was the fact that the `make` manual has information on how `stow` is actually one of the recommended workflows in makefiles (in the context of setting a DESTDIR); but I've never seen anyone actually do that in practice.