ajjackson's new dotfiles

Declaring bankruptcy and starting again

Things that worked well last time

• Org-babel

  • One file for emacs config and one file for everything else actually seemed to be a decent way of dividing

• Using one repository that works for multiple machines (as opposed to previous effort with Git branches)

Things to try differently

• Public on Github instead of private on bitbucket

  • Bitbucket's new authentication setup is really cumbersome for something I want to clone quickly on a new system and push changes from.
  • I don't really have any secrets in here anyway?

• Ditch the email stuff. I really did prefer notmuch to webmail, but every other aspect of configuration was too painful to keep up, and most of my accounts use Exchange now :-(

• Use elisp to conditionally tangle different stuff on different machines. I was finding it a bit tricky to specify the different use-cases / environments in previous hackery, the extra power should be helpful

• Don't name the setup script setup.py, that was really confusing because of Python conventions

• Use stow to distribute files that have system-dependent locations:

  • org-babel can tangle to a standard tree within a temporary director or this source folder
  • then call stow -t /suitable/root/position [packages] to copy them
  • --dotfiles argument automatically converts "dot-config" to ".config" etc for a nicer tree

• Use Elpaca instead of package.el

  • soooooo much faster
  • install unavailable packages by default, if it shouldn't be on this machine then don't configure it (see conditional tangling, above...)

Things that remain a bit of a headache

• It would be really nice if stow could easily be diffed against the current version. Maybe some kind of --dryrun/--diff mode can be added to make.el that handles this. Would need to:

  • Copy current stow files to a temporary directory
  • Re-stow from the temporary directory
  • Tangle files (which is hard-coded to the "main" stow path)
  • Diff the temporarary (and still-live) version with the new tangle
  • Clean up by deleting the newly-tangled files, moving back the temporary stow tree and re-linking everything to the normal path.

• That would be made a lot easier by putting all the stow directories under a folder rather than using the main source directory. It also makes it easier to .gitignore them?

Instructions

• For i3 I put a few scripts into ~/.local/bin; make sure those are visible. (i.e. add ~/.local/bin to PATH in ~/.profile)

• ./make.el to tangle dotfiles to directories

• stow -t $HOME --dotfiles i3 fish ... to symlink things to ~/.config and ~/.local/bin

  • Once there are more packages and machines set up, this should be included in make.el, fired off by an optional argument.

• The dotfiles feature is busted on most builds of GNU stow; we can still have dot-filenames but directories need to have the literal dot (and so are hard to list etc.)

  I was using a fork to get around this but it was more trouble than it was worth; for now, we use the mainline stow again.

  Since stow 2.4 this is fixed, once that has a chance to hit package managers maybe we can use it again :-D

Containers

An alpine container is defined for unit testing on Github. It can also be used manually, just follow the same steps as the CI job:

• build image
• run detached container
• archive the project folder and copy it into the container
• attach to container (or run commands with e.g. podman exec)
• extract files, run ./make.el and stow -t $HOME --dotfiles emacs bash ... to install desired features.