Re: Stow

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 09:58:15AM -0700, Paul Sander wrote:
> Each platform usually has a packaging method available as well.  Solaris,
> IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, and *BSD Unix all have packaging systems supplied
> with them.  Microsoft's systems have commercial products, e.g. InstallShield
> and InstallAnywhere that perform these tasks.

Don't they all take a fair amount of work to package up a given
distribution?

> Typically, the administrators of these systems know how to use the native
> packaging tools, so using yet another "non-standard" one (in their eyes,
> even if it's portable) is a trade-off.

If you're building a binary package for wide distribution,
absolutely -- whether that distribution is to the public or to
many similar machines within a large organization.

But if all you're trying to do is manage your own /usr/local,
when its contents are primarily third-party stuff you've built
from source, writing an RPM spec file or the like for every
darned source tarball you download seems to me to be more work
than it's worth.

In my case, there are eight or ten machines, with at least three
flavours of *NIX.  That'd be three package-spec files to write
per package.  The overhead would dwarf any advantage.

Stow is a *thin* layer over "make install"; whether that's a big
win or a showstopper depends on the circumstances.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
The acronym for "the powers that be" differs by only one letter
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