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2. Terminology

A package is a related collection of files and directories that you wish to administer as a unit—e.g., Perl or Emacs—and that needs to be installed in a particular directory structure—e.g., with ‘bin’, ‘lib’, and ‘man’ subdirectories.

A target directory is the root of a tree in which one or more packages wish to appear to be installed. A common, but by no means the only such location is ‘/usr/local’. The examples in this manual will use ‘/usr/local’ as the target directory.

A stow directory is the root of a tree containing separate packages in private subtrees. When Stow runs, it uses the current directory as the default stow directory. The examples in this manual will use ‘/usr/local/stow’ as the stow directory, so that individual packages will be, for example, ‘/usr/local/stow/perl’ and ‘/usr/local/stow/emacs’.

An installation image is the layout of files and directories required by a package, relative to the target directory. Thus, the installation image for Perl includes: a ‘bin’ directory containing ‘perl’ and ‘a2p’ (among others); an ‘info’ directory containing Texinfo documentation; a ‘lib/perl’ directory containing Perl libraries; and a ‘man/man1’ directory containing man pages.

A package directory is the root of a tree containing the installation image for a particular package. Each package directory must reside in a stow directory—e.g., the package directory ‘/usr/local/stow/perl’ must reside in the stow directory ‘/usr/local/stow’. The name of a package is the name of its directory within the stow directory—e.g., ‘perl’.

Thus, the Perl executable might reside in ‘/usr/local/stow/perl/bin/perl’, where ‘/usr/local’ is the target directory, ‘/usr/local/stow’ is the stow directory, ‘/usr/local/stow/perl’ is the package directory, and ‘bin/perl’ within is part of the installation image.

A symlink is a symbolic link. A symlink can be relative or absolute. An absolute symlink names a full path; that is, one starting from ‘/’. A relative symlink names a relative path; that is, one not starting from ‘/’. The target of a relative symlink is computed starting from the symlink’s own directory. Stow only creates relative symlinks.


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