🚀 go-pugleaf

Cameron Hutchison <camh@zip.net.au> writes:

> Maybe I did something wrong, but when I used stow to remove a package, it
> was *really slow*.

It has to be. The semantics it promises are not obtainable without a
full disk scan for symlinks to things under the package name you
specified.

Besides - you can run a package uninstallation in the background,
without difficulty.

Note that removal time is O(n) where n is the number of blocks occupied
by all directories on the disk; it is *not* related to the number of
packages you are removing. So remove lots at once :)

> It is similar to stow in that all packages are installed in
> /usr/local/pkg/<pkgname> and then symlinked into the /usr/local hierarchy.

Bear in mind that stow does not mandate this. I for instance stow from
/usr/packages.bin/core/<name> to /usr/<name> and have
/usr/packages.bin/core/<name> be a symlink to
/usr/packages.bin/name/version/.

Flexibility is good.

> It also supports multiple package repositories for multiple hierarchies.

Er, so does stow...

>   echo -n "instpkg: $1 is not a package name in \"" >&2

This means you cannot clean up dead packages after you delete the
package binaries. With that requirement I can see how you manage
blazingly fast deletion, but you also run the risk of leaving crap lying
around. It's easy to do this;

you have a package {foo} installed which has a file foo/bar in it;

you install a new foo which removes foo/bar;

later on, you remove foo.

The stowed link to foo/bar remains although the rest of foo is gone :(

> function pkg_installdir()
> {
[snip installdir and removedir]

Pardon me for being thick, but I can't see the split-and-recombine
semantics of stow in here. What happens, eg, with /usr/share/locale/,
which has stuff shared by multiple packages in it? Stow keeps things
symlinked to the package directory as much as possible and turns them
into real directories only when it must. (Some things, eg the ORBit from
out of the GNOME, effectively require this behaviour for them to work
correctly when installed.)

-- 
`The purpose of a windowing system is to put some amusing
 fluff around your one almighty emacs window.' -- Mark on gnu.emacs.help