Re: [PATCH] Add --stowdir and --delete options to chkstow

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 06:40:10PM +0100, [email protected] wrote:
> Hello,
>=20
> I use GNU stow to manage my dotfiles and I love it.

Great!  Me too :-)

As an aside, did you see this which I linked from
the homepage?

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-stow/2011-12/msg00000.html

> The only thing I missed was
> a way to remove leftover symlinks whenever I removed a file in my dotfi=
les
> repository.

You can achieve this simply by restowing a package: stow --restow

> When I looked at the source to find out how easy it might be to impleme=
nt what I
> needed, I stumbled upon chkstow (Which I had not heard of before =E2=80=
=93 A quick
> search tells me it=E2=80=99s not even mentioned in the man page) which =
was almost
> exactly what I looked for.
>=20
> However, it prints every single symlink that points to non-existing fil=
es, even
> though I only care about those files that point to non-existing files i=
n my stow
> directory (ie. my dotfiles repository).  Since the target is my home di=
rectory,
> there=E2=80=99s lots of garbage, abandoned projects, etc. lying around =
which contain
> stale symlinks.
>=20
> To accomplish my goals (which I hope are shared by others, hence I=E2=80=
=99m writing
> this mail), I added the following command line options:
>=20
> * --stowdir: Sets the stow directory, so chkstow can determine whether =
a path is
>   inside it, in order to ignore symlinks that point to outside of it.  =
By
>   default, this value is set to "/", to stay backwards compatible =E2=80=
=93 this way no
>   symlink will be ignored except if you supply this option.
>=20
> * --delete: Makes chkstow delete all the =E2=80=9Cbogus symlinks=E2=80=9D=
 it discovers.
>=20
> Both changes are attached as seperate patches to this email.  Feel free=
 to tell
> me what I did wrong, since this is the first snippet of perl code I wro=
te in my
> whole life.

That sounds very promising, thanks!  Any chance you could submit as a
pull request to https://github.com/aspiers/stow ?

Cheers,
Adam