Re: [Stow-devel] Installing Software

[Adam Spiers]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Jason Self <address@hidden> wrote:
> Troy Will wrote:
>> GNU Stow works on both binary and text files. For example, I've written a
>> number of programs in Perl and maintain them as Stow packages.  A GNU Stow
>> package is simply a set of files in a stow directory - it doesn't matter if
>> those files are binary or not. Maybe I'm not understanding what you are
>> referring to by binary package.
>
> It's true that I hadn't considered programs written in an interpreted
> language. I was referring to programs that must be compile before they can
> be run. So...
>
>> If I understand the documentation correctly GNU Stow is geared toward
>> binary packages and that those packages must somehow already exist
>> within the stow directory in order to be able to install them?
>
> ...was intended to mean that such software must already exist in the stow
> directory in its compiled form.

s/its compiled/a ready to use/

It doesn't even have to be software - I personally use Stow for
managing my configuration files:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-stow/2011-12/msg00000.html

although that's probably not of as much relevance to this discussion.

On Apr 2, 2012 9:29 PM, "Jason Self" <address@hidden> wrote:
> If there were ever an official release of the GNU Operating System how
> would those packages get there? Should the GNU Installer (which doesn't
> seem to exist yet) put GNU packages into the stow directory so that
> they're then in an installable state? That seems like it would be a waste
> of space just to have a GNU package be "available."
>
> Maybe there should be mechanism for retrieving the desired packages (from
> somewhere, perhaps over the internet and/or from the install media) and
> dropping them into the stow directory?
>
> What about the source code? It might be nice if there were an easy way to
> change, say, the configure flags that were used to create the binary so
> that some features could be enabled/disabled/changed/whatever.
>
> Just some thoughts. Thanks for listening.

I would caution against over-estimating the scope of GNU Stow.  It
would be more accurate to call it a symlink farm manager than a
package manager; the latter would have some kind of dependency
management, metadata and content tracking / verification, and
pre-/post- hooks for (un)install at the absolute minimum, whereas Stow
does not have any of these.

If you really need a package manager, is there some kind of licensing
or philosophical issue which prevents you from just using rpm or dpkg?
It would be a great shame to unnecessarily re-invent the wheel.  And
that raises the wider question (discussion of which should be
continued on gnu-system-discuss, not here) - how would such an OS
release differ from the other distros out there?  I am inclined to
agree with Daniel Martin's opinion:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-03/msg00004.html

There really needs to be a compelling motive for embarking on such a
project, otherwise GNU would benefit more from effort spent in other
areas.  Apologies if this sounds overly negative - my intention is
purely to be pragmatic.