[Help-stow] stow problem

[Lars Hecking]

 Hi all,

 I would like to use stow to clean up the current mess in /usr/local,
 but due to our particular setup here, it doesn't seem possible. This
 setup cannot be changed without major breakage.

 /usr/local is set up as follows to facilitate multiple architectures:

 - fstab mounts /usr/local-mount from a central server
   this directory contains
   arch1
   arch2
   ...
   archN
   share

 - /usr/local is a symlink to /usr/local-mount/$archN

 /usr/local/share is the home directory of a non-root user that owns
 everything under /usr/local-mount, and /usr/local/share itself is a
 symlink to ../share, i.e. the central share directory directly under
 /usr/local-mount. With this setup, said non-root user has the same
 home directory regardless of which platform this user logs into.

$ cd /usr/local
$ ls -ld share
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     other           8 Feb 15  1999 share -> ../share/

 The /usr/local/share directory already contains all kinds of stuff
 that is archictecture independent, e.g. man pages:

$ cd /usr/local
$ ls -ld man
 lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     users           9 Feb 15  1999 man -> share/man/

 Problem is, this setup seems to be completely incompatible with stow.
 It reports conflicts for all these symlinks, /usr/local/share being the
 most critical one. Of course, instead of /usr/local I could use some
 other directory as target directory, but that would make things more
 complicated.

 Any thoughts how to tackle this problem?

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