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stow
====

Stow is an installation manager for local software packages.  It creates sets
of symlinks from the installed location (e.g. /usr/local) to a stow directory
(e.g. /usr/local/stow/emacs) where the real files live. This allows you to keep
packages separate, while making them appear to be installed in the same place.

Note that because stow uses symlinks to install files, it will probably only be
effective for software that is used only in the Cygwin environment and doesn't
install any DLLs.  The reason is that Cygwin symlinks are implemented in the
Windows file system as shortcuts (.lnk files), but Windows shortcuts are
fundamentally broken:  Windows will not, as a rule (the only exception being for
GUI operations in Windows Explorer), interpret a shortcut as a pointer to a
file.  Cygwin corrects this and emulates the Unix behavior, but Windows programs
won't, and Windows PATH searches for DLLs won't follow shortcuts either.
