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INSTALL.md

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How to install GNU Stow

Prerequisites

Stow is a collection of Perl scripts and modules. You must have Perl 5.6.1 or later in order for it to run. The test suite also requires the Test::More and Test::Output modules which can be obtained from CPAN. They are also available as packages in some of the GNU/Linux distributions.

Installation methods

Stow can either be installed via the standard GNU Autotools procedure (./configure && make install) or since 2.1.0, via CPAN-style via Module::Build.

Advantages of the Autotools approach:

  • It's arguably more flexible.

  • It will install the documentation in Info, HTML, man, and PDF formats.

Advantages of the Module::Build approach:

  • It's more in keeping with the standard way to distribute CPAN modules.

  • It performs dependency checking to ensure you have the necessary Perl modules installed.

Both approaches are described in detail below. However if you are building from the git repository rather than an official release, you first need to perform some extra steps:

Preparatory steps required only when building from git

configure and Makefile are included in official releases of Stow, but they are deliberately omitted from the git repository because they are autogenerated. Therefore if you are installing directly from git, you first need to generate them as follows.

First cd to the directory containing the source code (and this file), and then run:

autoreconf -iv

If this runs successfully then you are ready to continue with one of the two installation methods below.

Basic Installation via Module::Build

The steps in building Stow are:

  1. cd to the directory containing the source code (and this file).

  2. If you are building from an official GNU release tarball, type ./configure && make to configure stow for your system. If you are building from a CPAN tarball, this step can be skipped.

    If make warns that the Perl module installation directory is not in @INC, then you should run:

    eval `perl -V:siteprefix`
./configure --prefix=$siteprefix && make

    to avoid a superfluous use lib line in your stow executable.

  3. Type perl Build.PL.

  4. Type ./Build install to install the various files. As noted above, this installs fewer files than the Autotools installation.

Basic Installation via Autotools

The steps in building Stow are:

  1. cd to the directory containing the source code (and this file).

  2. Type ./configure to configure stow for your system. This step will attempt to locate your copy of perl and set its location in Makefile.in. You can use the normal arguments to change the default installation paths (see below); additionally you can use the

    --with-pmdir=/path/to/perl/modules

    option to manually choose where the Perl modules get installed. However, if you don't, the configure script will go to great lengths to try to choose a sensible default.

  3. Type make install to install the various files. If the chosen installation directory for Perl modules is not included in Perl's built-in @INC search path, the Makefile rules will automatically insert a

    use lib "...";

    line into the generated stow script to ensure that it can always locate the Perl modules without needing to manually set PERL5LIB.

  4. You can remove the generated files from the source code directory by typing make clean. To also remove the files that configure created (so you can compile the package for a different computer), type make distclean. There is also a make maintainer-clean target, but that is intended mainly for stow's developers. If you use it, you may have to get all sorts of other programs in order to regenerate files that came with the distribution.

Installation Names

By default, make install will install the package's files in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/info. You can specify an installation prefix other than /usr/local by giving configure the option --prefix=PATH.

If the package supports it, you can cause programs to be installed with an extra prefix or suffix on their names by giving configure the option --program-prefix=PREFIX or --program-suffix=SUFFIX.

Since stow is concerned with separating a package's installation tree from its run-time tree, you might want to install stow into a directory such as /usr/local/stow/stow but have it run out of /usr/local. Do this by giving the run-time prefix (e.g., /usr/local) to configure as described above; then run make; then run make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/stow. For more information on this technique, see the Stow manual.

The configuration system

The configure shell script attempts to guess correct values for various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses those values to create a Makefile and to create the stow script itself, using Makefile.in and stow.in as templates. Finally, it creates a shell script config.status that you can run in the future to recreate the current configuration, a file config.cache that saves the results of its tests to speed up reconfiguring, and a file config.log containing other output.

The file configure.ac is used to create configure by a program called autoconf. You only need configure.ac if you want to change it or regenerate configure using a newer version of autoconf.

The file Makefile.am is used to create Makefile.in by a program called automake. You only need Makefile.am if you want to change it or regenerate Makefile.in using a newer version of automake.

Sharing Defaults

If you want to set default values for configure scripts to share, you can create a site shell script called config.site that gives default values for variables like CC, cache_file, and prefix. configure looks for PREFIX/share/config.site if it exists, then PREFIX/etc/config.site if it exists. Or, you can set the CONFIG_SITE environment variable to the location of the site script. A warning: not all configure scripts look for a site script.

Operation Controls

configure recognizes the following options to control how it operates.

--cache-file=FILE Use and save the results of the tests in FILE instead of ./config.cache. Set FILE to /dev/null to disable caching, for debugging configure.

--help Print a summary of the options to configure, and exit.

--quiet --silent -q Do not print messages saying which checks are being made.

--srcdir=DIR Look for the package's source code in directory DIR. Usually configure can determine that directory automatically.

--version Print the version of Autoconf used to generate the configure script, and exit.

configure also accepts some other, not widely useful, options.

License for this file

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty.