stow does nothing?

[thomporter]

This looks nice!

I wanted to give it a try on my fresh Ubuntu 14 install. I followed the instructions, git cloned the repo fine, but stow seems to have no effect. I was using bash, installed & setup zsh and tried again, still nothing. Adding -v for verbose mode didn't change the empty output either... 😦 Any ideas?

I can just copy the stuff in I suppose, it is a fresh install... I do have my own aliases setup, but I put them in a .alises file so no conflict there... Still, I like the idea behind stow, would prefer to go that route. 👍

[aspiers]

Could you provide a gist of a shell session where you demonstrate this issue? I'm a bit mystified by the description (do you mean Stow runs but doesn't output anything at all??) but without more information I'm at a loss for how I can help.

[thomporter]

Sure thing: https://gist.github.com/thomporter/1712f735ca9580bebf05

It just outputs nothing to the console and even after logging out and back in, nothing works... bin/ is empty and "un" for example doesn't work...

[aspiers]

What about the about of which stow? How did you install it?

[thomporter]

For sure =)

thom@thom:~$ which stow
/usr/bin/stow

[thomporter]

thom@thom:~$ stow -V
stow (GNU Stow) version 2.2.0

[thomporter]

sorry, I missed the "How" in your question... I used apt-get install stow

[aspiers]

Well, the absence of any output doesn't mean it didn't work, and the same is actually true with -v. You would need at least -vv to see anything in this case (don't ask me why, I can't remember).

Did you actually look to see if any of the symlinks were created? un could be failing to execute for any number of other reasons, e.g. ~/bin missing from $PATH. What does ls -l ~/bin show?

[thomporter]

I don't see anything changing at all... In my gist I did an ls -al ~/bin for you, it's there but empty.

Here's the -vv output from stow:

stow dir is /home/thom
stow dir path relative to target /home/thom is .
Planning stow of package shell-env...
Skipping target which was current stow directory .
Planning stow of package shell-env... done
Processing tasks...

how crazy is that -vv switch? I've never seen that before. They should add it to the -h output!

[thomporter]

ok, that must be intentional, do other unix programs have the additional v's for increased verbosity? 20 years on linux and I'm just learning that???

So I had to try more v's of course, and adding a 3rd shows me more output:

stow dir is /home/thom
stow dir path relative to target /home/thom is .
cwd now /home/thom
cwd restored to /home/thom
cwd now /home/thom
Planning stow of package shell-env...
Skipping target which was current stow directory .
Planning stow of package shell-env... done
cwd restored to /home/thom
Processing tasks...

adding 12 more v's didn't seem to do anything, but I tried. =)

[aspiers]

Yes, it's definitely intentional :-) I've seen it before in a few places. Also similar to stuff like the -w switch of ps(1).

I think the key message in your case is Skipping target which was current stow directory .
It indicates that your stow directory and target directory were the same path, and that will not work.

[thomporter]

I agree, but am not sure how to proceed. I've tried a few things:

thom@thom:~$ stow -vvvv -d . -t ~ /home/thom/shell-env
Undefined subroutine &main::error called at /usr/bin/stow line 572, <DATA> line 18.

so I tried moving it around, first to /usr/share/stows/shell-env and then to ~/stows/shell-env and it always gave me the same <DATA> error as above...

[thomporter]

Got it!

mkdir ~/stows
mv shell-env ~/stows/
cd stows
stow shell-env

had to resolve conflicts and then it worked. 👍

[aspiers]

thom@thom:~$ stow -vvvv -d . -t ~ /home/thom/shell-env
Undefined subroutine &main::error called at /usr/bin/stow line 572, line 18.

This was fixed already.

[aspiers]

Hopefully aspiers/stow@89c9ca63 will prevent this kind of confusion from arising in the future.