CStow is a software package management tool. Essentially, it is a simplified clone of GNU Stow. The main differences between GNU Stow and CStow are:

1. CStow is implemented in C with almost no external dependencies. It should compile in any POSIX system out of the box.

2. CStow will never create symbolic links for directories when installing packages; only files will be symlinked. This behaviour is intentional.

3. CStow is way simpler than GNU Stow. It cannot deferr, override, adopt or ignore files, and it doesn't support ignore files.

The lack of dependencies makes CStow useful when you want to use GNU Stow but aren't allowed to (or don't want to) install Perl and all its transitive dependencies on the system. Also, as CStow doesn't symlink directories, it works well in conjunction with other tools like FreeBSD ports o NetBSD pkgsrc; this way, you can have all your local software in /usr/local instead of having multiple local trees.

If you don't mind having Perl around, or don't use other package management tools that might have problems with symlinked directories, you shouldn't use CStow; GNU Stow is more mature and featureful.

Installation

To compile and install cstow in your system:

1. Edit the Makefile file and change the INSTALL_DIR variable to suit your system.

2. Optionally, you can tune the CFLAGS variable.

3. Execute the make install command (you may need root privileges depending on the value of INSTALL_DIR). This will compile the sources and copy the executable to the place you defined in the previous step.

If you want to run the tests:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update
$ make test

This should work in any modern POSIX-like system (tested with FreeBSD 11-STABLE, Mac OS X 10.11.6, Debian 8 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). If that's not the case, please open an issue with the details.

Usage

For the moment, the only documentation available is the output of the -h flag and the src/TESTS.md file.

As CStow supports a subset of GNU Stow functionality, you can read the documentation for the GNU Stow package available at http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ to get more details.

Known bugs

CStow will fail to unstow a package that contains a symbolic link pointing outside the package directory. This happens because cstow uses the realpath() function to resolve filenames; as this function returns the target filename for symbolic links, cstow thinks that it is trying to delete a file that is not owned by the package and refuses to remove it.

As this is not a common scenario, I won't fix it until someone opens an issue about it.