various suggestions for mr

[Adam Spiers]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> You wrote "However I might very well want to manually place other
> files inside ~/local which have nothing to do with stow".
>
> Now you wrote "As far as I'm aware, all my files are nicely
> separated into appropriate packages".
>
> That confuses me.  I was responding to your approach in which you
> describe how you make stow unfold by creating a dummy 'antifold'
> package which would allow you store files not managed by stow in
> your ~/local

Ah, I see!  Well, in an ideal world, I would have time to ensure that
every single file in my home directory is perfectly managed as a stow
package :-) But in practice is there anyone who really achieves that?
There are many cases where it just isn't worth the effort.  Perhaps
~/local was a bad example, because that path is suggestive of a
typical GNU-like installation sequence:

    ./configure --prefix=~/local
    make install

in which case I agree it's not much more effort to do:

    ./configure --prefix=~/.stow/$pkgname
    make install
    # now install via stow

but there are plenty of other examples where it is not pragmatic to
spend the time ensuring every single file is controlled by stow, e.g.

    ./configure --prefix=~
    make install            # this puts some files in ~/doc

    # days/weeks/months later:
    emacs ~/doc/shopping-list.txt

Without a ~/doc/.no-stow-folding file present, suddenly you have
accidentally put your shopping list inside a third party piece of
software :-) And it's not worth having a stow package for a shopping
list which will probably be deleted tomorrow anyway.

Another approach would be to add an option to stow that disables tree
folding entirely; it shouldn't be hard to do that.  But personally I
find tree folding useful as long as it's managed well.