Hi all, GNU Stow 2.4.0 is now finally available for download from
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/stow/
and also from the mirrors as soon as they catch up.
You can see a list of mirrors at http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html
or use http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/stow/ which will automatically
redirect to a nearby mirror.
I would like to sincerely apologise to all Stow users for this
incredibly overdue release, the cadence of which is perhaps vaguely
reminiscent of releases by the great Donald Knuth, except with none of
the grace and deliberate planning.
Going forwards, I hope to avoid such long gaps between releases.
Two concrete actions have been taken towards this goal.
Firstly, I am putting out a call for a co-maintainer. Details here:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?65569
Secondly, this latest release makes considerable efforts to make the
internals more understandable and easy to maintain. Documentation,
comments, function and variable names, and the test suite structure
have all been improved in many places.
But what is Stow?
=================
Stow is a symlink farm manager program which takes distinct sets
of software and/or data located in separate directories on the
filesystem, and makes them all appear to be installed in a single
directory tree.
While Stow has often been used to manage system-wide software
installations, it also provides a clean mechanism for managing
software and configuration files in users' home directories:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-stow/2011-12/msg00000.html
More information is available at the homepage:
http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
Below is a summary of the changes since the previous release, but
please see NEWS and the git history for full details:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/stow.git/tree/NEWS
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/stow.git/log/
Changes in v2.4.0
=================
1. --dotfiles now works with directories
----------------------------------------
A long-standing bug preventing the --dotfiles option from working
correctly with directories has been fixed.
It should also works in combination with the --compat option.
2. Eliminated a spurious warning on unstowing
---------------------------------------------
Version 2.3.1 introduced a benign but annoying warning when unstowing
in certain circumstances. It looked like this:
BUG in find_stowed_path? Absolute/relative mismatch between Stow dir X and
path Y
This was caused by erroneous logic, and has now been fixed.
3. Unstowing logic has been improved in other cases
---------------------------------------------------
Several other improvements have been made internally to the unstowing
logic. These changes should all be either invisible (except for
changes to debug output) or improvements, but if you encounter any
unexpected behaviour, please report it as directed in the manual.
4. Improved debug output
------------------------
Extra output resulting from use of the -v / --verbose flag now appears
in a more logical and understandable way.
5. Janitorial tasks
-------------------
Users are not substantially affected by these changes, so the details
have been omitted from this announcement, but again please see NEWS
and the git history for full details via the above links.
6. Various maintainer tweaks
----------------------------
Further improved the release process and its documentation in various
minor ways.
Happy hacking,
Adam
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
