Symlink Gardener

Symlink Gardener is a symlink farm manager akin to GNU Stow, but with additional features that are useful for tasks such as managing dotfiles.

Features

Options for conflict resolution. By default, packages will silently shadow symlinks from packages with lower precedence than them, but actions will fail when there are conflicts with "weeds" (files not owned by the garden). However, different conflict resolution strategies can also be specified.
A more tangible concept of packages than stow. Packages can have their own config files to declare files to ignore (and maybe more stuff in the future), and packages have a real concept of being installed which allows symlinks to be easily and accurately updated when packages change.
Commands for converting specific weeds into symlinks managed by the garden and vice-versa.
And most importantly -- hastily tacked on gardening metaphors!

Python >= 3.6 is required.

Recommended installation (with pipsi):

$ pipsi install --python=python3 symlink-gardener

Create a garden in the current directory

$ gardener prepare

Plant (install) packages in the garden

This creates symlinks in the garden directory at paths that correspond to those in the package directory.

Packages may be customized in /.garden-package.json (currently all you can do is add ignore patterns)

$ gardener plant path/to/common path/to/ex other-ex:path/to/other/ex

Update symlinks for all installed packages

$ gardener tend

Add weeds to an installed package.

This moves the specified files from the garden directory to the package and creates a symlink in their place.

$ gardener cultivate -p common some/file another/file

Turn those symlinks back into weeds.

$ gardener fallow some/file another/file

Change package precedence.

This causes symlinks owned by ex to shadow symlinks owned by all other packages. Earlier, the package other-ex was in front of it.

$ gardener arrange --front ex

Prune (uninstall) packages

$ gardener prune ex other-ex

See the help for more

$ gardener help