Linux.com

The people on here touting packages clearly don't understand the value of stow in and of itself. It's a necessary tool, and reminds of epkg from times back. When you need to keep versions of software that don't have packages written for them in a format that is easily removable at the drop of a hat, stow is excellent. Additionally, compile-time options that are critical evade the use of packages. I've went from building my own packages for years under Solaris, surviving RPM (horrible package management), and all of the various package setups for *nix-like OSes over the years.

Most package toolsets have things like fakeroot, etc that prior to building the actual package from the package installation directory, kind of do similar things... but it makes its way into an actual package format. Stow abstracts this idea, just like epkg did.

-- Ex-sysadmin

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