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by skydhash 656 days ago
That's provisioning, not dotfiles management. My dotfiles only includes config files. I'd just use the package manager to install packages and I'd just use the relevant program to enable stuff. As I use stow, I just create different configurations for different OS if they differ too much. At most, a handful of scripts to customize my user account.
1 comments
sophacles 656 days ago
A different view worth considering:

Dotfiles are just a component, but not the whole story, of your personal compute environment. Your environment also includes things like:

* ~/bin scripts (etc)

* programming language stuff - e.g. go, rust, python, ruby etc have tooling for per-user package management, language version, etc.

* various forms of password/key/auth stuff like ssh allow lists, encrypted password stores, etc.

And the biggest one: Type of machine - work, daily driver, server, etc

The type of machine may require different dotfiles or different parts of dotfiles (e.g. what basrc includes from `. .config/bash/my_local_funcs`), and having some scripting around this makes life easier.

Similarly OS packages are great, and I use them heavily, but work and personal servers and personal desktop all use a different OS, so its useful to have provision scripts for the type of machine, and i keep all that together with my dotfiles (etc) in my "personal environment repo" (it's name is dots, and when i talk about dotfiles I really mean "personal environment". I suspect other share this view, which leads to this "pure dotfiles" vs "dotfiles+parts of provisioning" viewpoint difference even though they largely have the same set of problems and tooling.

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skydhash 656 days ago
The majority of my computing happens at my workstation (desktop). That is what I consider my personal environment, and I would script its setup, but I can't find the motivation to do so (and I like to do ad-hoc changes). Permanent configuration (related to my usage, not the computer. My core utilities, I can say) get added to my dotfiles. As for server and works, their intersection and my personal stuff are minimal (mostly bash, vim, emacs?) I'd rather have a different system/project to manage them.
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indemnity 654 days ago
This is why I use Nix + home-manager to manage my CLI, programming environment, and system configuration across Linux, macOS and WSL using one GitHub repo. It also handles differences across machine types well.

A dot file management system is only part of the picture.

To spin up a new machine is a 30 minute job, and then it feels like “home”.

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