What's a "good" way to handle installation of conflicting ports?

[David Wolfskill]

I've been asked to come up with at least an interim approach --
that can be implemented within a few days -- to allow the SAs at
my new job to install conflicting ports on the same machine.

I can think of some approaches, but I'd prefer to use one that doesn't
suck too much, and that doesn't impede the transition to something better.
I would also like to continue to be able to make use of the FreeBSD
"ports" system, and be able to take advantage of the ports collection,
such as dependency-tracking.

Their (the SAs) stated preferred approach is to use GNU stow
(sysutils/stow), though I've not used it previously, and I'm not
quite clear on just how that would work in practice -- and still provide
the benefits of the FreeBSD "ports" system as mentioned above.  (They
use it for the Linux machines; not sure about the Solaris machines.)

The catalyst for the exercise is that we have some pools of machines
for developers to use; some of the developers wish to use
editors/xemacs; some wish to use editors/emacs -- on the same machine.
(Given the requirement, it's OK for the affected folks to need to adjust
search, library, and man paths.)

(I haven't been in the new position long enough to know why folks can't
just each use their own desktop/workstations, configured however each
one sees fit.  Even so, I suppose that there might be a developer out
there who might want conflicting ports on his dektop -- I've had that
request before ... or rather, a request that implied that:  One of the
developers at a previous place of employment was distressed when he
determined that he was unable to install every port in the ports
collection on his desktop machine.  In that case, his local disk storage
gave out before he ran into the "conflicts" issue, but I'm sure that
would have come up eventually.)

(I've subscribed to -ports@, at least for now, so there's no need to
copy me on messages sent to the list.)

Anyway, thanks in advance for suggestions -- even pointing out why a
certain approach would be inadvisable would be helpful.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
I submit that "conspiracy" would be an appropriate collective noun for cats.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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