Episode: 2552
Title: HPR2552: What is stow?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2552/hpr2552.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:25:07

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This in HPR episode 2,552 entitled What is To?
It is hosted by Clacket and in about 12 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, how does To work, why would you want it and what are its limitations?
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Hi, I'm Clacket. A week ago I was talking about MCS 2. That was 5 minutes ago.
I've not been looking at my phone and another suitable episode that I can do on my way home from the bank is
What is Stowe?
Stowe has a long history dating back to the 90s which is pretty long in internet time anyway.
So you have this situation that you're on a machine and you have something you want to build from source.
So you take that thing and you configure, make install and then it's the question where you're going to install it.
If you are the administrator of the machine, you can probably just go with the defaults, put it in slush USR, slash local.
And that will be fine.
But then there's a new version of this thing coming out and then you need to have some way to upgrade.
Maybe you can just make install again on a new version and it will override the old stuff and that will just work.
Or maybe it won't and if it does work, if you have a package that has removed some files since last time those files will still be sloshing around there in your slash USR, slash local.
And what if you want to uninstall your package entirely?
Then some packages over make uninstall. Most packages don't. Those that do may or may not work.
So there are a couple of ways around this. On Debian there's a package I forget the name now but you can basically monitor your make install process.
And note all the files that you installed and then it makes a Debian package out of what just happened.
So that Debian package gets installed and then you can uninstall it using the normal Debian tools. So that's one way.
But there's also a more generic way and I think it's the simplest possible package manager.
The website says and angry people on the internet have told me that it's not a package manager. It's say what is it?
It's a Simlink tree management software. It's a package manager.
You just, the packages are just handled as Simlink trees.
So what this means is that you install your thing, let's say you are a local user.
So you're a non-root user. So you're doing this out of the necessity of being able to handle packages at all.
You cannot use the Debian wrapper. I'll check install I think it's called the Debian wrapper.
All you have is your local home directory and that's it.
What you do then is you, when you make install, if it's a nicely behaved auto tools like configured package, then you can configure with dash dash prefixed equals slash home slash clock slash dot local.
And then when you install it, you can do make install prefix equals slash home slash clock, slash dot local slash stow slash package name dash version.
So what that means is the package will think that it lives in just your home directory dot local.
But when you install it, you install it somewhere else.
And the recommendation is you call it package dot package slash package name slash version.
So that the next time a new version of this package comes out, you can just call that package name dash the new version.
And then what you do is you simlink the version directory to a nonversion director with just a plain name.
So I have my app 1.0.
I install that to dot local slash my app 1.0.
And then I simlink my app dash 1.0 to my app.
And then what I do is if I have stow installed, I just go to home directory dot local slash stow and then I just stow package name.
And that's it.
So it expects that in package name, you will have the usual ETC, lab, bin, etc.
OK, directories.
And it will, if I lie to you, I will say that it will take all the files in there.
It will create the according directory structure in your dot local.
And then we'll simlink all the files into that directory structure.
It's a little bit cleverer than that in reality.
If you have only one packet that has a lib directory, you will not create a lib directory called your files into there.
It will just make your dot local slash lib a simlink directed to the lib inside your package.
So you save a couple of I notes there and a couple of layers of interaction.
And the next time you go around and you install their app 1.0, then if that also has a lib directory, stow will recognize that, hey, this is a simlink, but actually it's a simlink that I manage.
It's linking to inside the stow directory.
So we will just split that up, make sure, OK, now it's a real dot local slash lib directory.
And I'm simulating all the things from my app and their app into this directory.
So this is all nice when you have self-contained packages and no dependencies.
When you have dependencies, you have a couple of choices to make and they are all bad in different ways.
So you can say that, OK, I'm going to build, I have my lib and then I'm going to build my app which depends on my lib.
So I can either say, OK, my app depends on slash home slash clock slash dot local slash lib slash slash my lib dot SO.
And that's going to work.
But then if a new my lib comes out, let's say you had version 1.0 and version 1.1 comes out.
And according to semantic versioning, this 1.1 is supposed to be compatible with 1.0 and it probably is.
And in that case, you install your new 1.1 in your stow my lib 1.1.
You re-point your my lib singling and then you stow dash capital R.
This means go through my my directories and check if there's any dead references to this package and if so, delete them.
And if I have any new references in the in the directory that I'm not represented, assume links them, please assume link them.
But what if 1.1 and 1.0 are not compatible? Maybe it breaks my app because someone made a mistake or maybe you misunderstood their versioning scheme or whatever.
So in that case, you should have instead of telling it to use just dot local slash lib to find my lib.
You should have told it instead. Oh, you should have used the local slash stow slash specific package version my lib dash 1.0 slash lib.
So you could always do that. But of course, then you have a new problem that, okay, I do the 1.1 came out.
Now it works just fine with my app but my app is already compiled to use 1.0 and it's not locked on that directory.
If you remove that directory, it's going to stop working.
So you need to keep my lib 1.0 hanging around and then maybe when my app 2 comes around, maybe you compile that with my lib 1.1.
And now you've got a bunch of directories lying around and you don't know really which one depends on which.
If you remove my app 1.0, of course, you would be able to remove my lib 1.0 as well. But you have to know that.
Otherwise, you'll just think, oh, better just have it lying around just to be sure.
So if you get into these complicated situations, then it's time to graduate from stow academy and move on to get a doctorate in nix or geeks because this is basically what they do on the next level.
Everything depends on an absolute version. And when you remove things, you can garbage collect the things that they depend on.
I've already talked about that in another episode. So I will refer you back to the how awesome is geeks and everyday geeks use episodes in the show notes.
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