| What I realized after 25 years is that configuration comes in three parts: 1/ the defaults, either built in or read from /etc; 2/ my defaults, included in each file (or with ssh, at the bottom) with that particular config’s native version of #include; and 3/ local specifics that are rarely if ever used anywhere else, or trivially short as to be copy-paste-able. Almost everything I want to customize goes into (2) so I wrote a single Python function that manages a block at the top (or with ssh, at the bottom) of each config file: # BEGIN my foo stuff
include = /my/repo/foo/config
# END my foo stuff
That way foo starts out with (1) the system defaults; then adds (2) my personal foo defaults as defined in a working copy at /my/repo; (3) anything else I insert in the file after that which isn’t centrally managed and that’s ok.I haven’t ever needed anything more complicated. I do not have any work specific configs that I need to gate. I no longer have to manage different configs based on whether I am using Debian, Debian (old), Debian (very old), SunOS (very very old), or AIX (very very very old) because those days are behind me. If you do still need to manage slightly different but ethereally different configs on different hosts then I’m sorry to hear that. Rationalising my computing life so that I use the latest version of some Linux distribution everywhere has been very helpful! |