You might also enjoy xstow, a reimplementation in c++ -- in case you might want to use stow without having perl:

http://xstow.sourceforge.net/

edit: I use xstow for managing ~/opt -- putting stuff like ~/opt/xstow/golang-git, with symlinks to  ~/opt/{bin,lib,man} -- making it easy to add the relevant folders to PATH, MANPATH etc in .bashrc.