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Message-ID: <4289C0C5.70103@atomice.net>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 11:00:37 +0100
From: Chris January <chris AT atomice DOT net>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] New package: stow
References: <20050517090007 DOT 762DF6D41F6 AT calimero DOT vinschen DOT de>
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Schulman DOT Andrew AT epamail DOT epa DOT gov wrote:
> The stow package is now available in the Cygwin distribution.  Stow is an 
> installation manager for local software packages.  It creates sets of 
> symlinks from the installed location (e.g. /usr/local) to a stow directory 
> (e.g. /usr/local/stow/emacs) where the real files live. This allows you to 
> keep packages separate, while making them appear to be installed in the 
> same place.
> 
> Note that because stow uses symlinks to install files, it will probably 
> only be effective for software that is used only in the Cygwin environment 
> and doesn't install any DLLs.  The reason is that Cygwin symlinks are 
> implemented in the Windows file system as shortcuts (.lnk files), but 
> Windows shortcuts are fundamentally broken:  Windows will not, as a rule 
> (the only exception being for GUI operations in Windows Explorer), 
> interpret a shortcut as a pointer to a file.  Cygwin corrects this and 
> emulates the Unix behavior, but Windows programs won't, and PATH searches 
> for DLLs won't follow shortcuts either.

Does stow have support for hard links at all? If not is that an easy 
thing to add in? Such an option would make stow more useful on Cygwin, IMHO.

Chris

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