Simplifying file management with GNU Stow
Conclusions
Following the Unix philosophy, GNU Stow specializes in simplifying file management tasks. It is very useful if you want to distribute dotfiles locally between users or computers. If it is a question of making dotfiles available to other users beyond your own network, it is a good idea to extend Stow to include the home script from GitHub [6] (Figure 5). Stow's documentation [7] is, as with most GNU projects, very detailed. The tool does exactly what it says on the box with minimal effort. I did not experience a single error in my test.
Figure 5: A repository on GitHub, or with your trusted provider, is connected to the local repository. It then versions private or public changes to the dotfiles.
Infos
- Stow: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
- FHS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
- XDG: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory
- yadm: https://yadm.io/
- GitHub notes on dotfiles: http://dotfiles.github.io/
- home: https://github.com/cdwilson/home
- Stow documentation: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html
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