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Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

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Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#91

Post by cwel »

mmh0000 wrote: post #8

I’ve always managed this problem in a different way. I don’t know if my way is better, but it works really well for me. I treat my powerful desktop computer as my main machine. Then I have a bunch of laptops. Then I just rsync my entire home directory out to all the laptops. From there. The rule is quite simple. Any file created on a laptop are considered ephemeral. If I create data that I have to keep. It gets rsync…

  > rsync my entire home directory out to all the laptops
Interesting approach. Whether it could be considered 'better' or not depends on what your 'handful of shell scripts' do.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#92

Post by technojamin »

I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years, but I originally started off by rolling my own dotfiles setup with a Git repo about 6 years ago: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment

I don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need (per-machine config, secrets, templating), but I get a deep satisfaction from the fact that I understand every part of this setup from top to bottom. It only has the functionality I need, and I know it doesn't depend on anything that might become unmaintained since it's just POSIX shell scripts.

Even still, I might eventually make the jump to something like chezmoi or nix if I'm not able to implement something I need easily, but that hasn't happened yet.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#93

Post by nickjj »

technojamin wrote: post #92

I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years, but I originally started off by rolling my own dotfiles setup with a Git repo about 6 years ago: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment I don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need (per-machine config, secrets, templating), but I get a deep satisfaction from the fact that I understand eve…

> don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need

I thought about using any one of those tools but happily chose shell scripts and symlinks instead. It hasn't let me down in almost a decade with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice and would highly recommend this approach.

It's basically a 2,500 line shell script to fully automate setting up a system from scratch in a general purpose / opinionated but customizable way that works on Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, macOS and supports WSL 2 in Windows. I have it running on multiple systems, no need to even fork it since it uses patterns suitable for making changes in git ignored files and also has a config file for certain things.

When it comes to setting up a complete desktop environment or even just terminal based tools, dotfiles IMO are more than config files. There's install scripts, packages, system level configs, running commands, OS specific differences and more. It's really nice to be able to run 1 command and have a fresh system ready to go in about 10 minutes.

Shell script is probably my favorite language at this point.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#94

Post by vsviridov »

LVB wrote: post #60
vsviridov wrote: post #23

Switched to Chezmoi from random assortment of manually authored scripts. The workflow takes some getting used to, because I constantly edit the actual files without calling `chezmoi edit` first, and have to merge. I like that when combined with `mise` ( https://mise.jdx.dev ) I can roll out a new computer in 2-3 commands and have my entire environment configured the way I like, with neovim and all the plugins and lan…

I never did get used to the Chezmoi workflow. `chezmoi edit` never became muscle memory, and I was constant finding myself resolving diffs and what not.

BeyondCompare 2-way merge usually resolves everything automatically, and it's set up as the default mergetool for me, so it's only a couple of clicks... But yeah, takes some muscle memory.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#95

Post by arikrahman »

colordrops wrote: post #13
drdexebtjl wrote: post #5

I had similar problems with GNU Stow, but switched to Nix and Home Manager instead. I think Chezmoi's templates and file naming conventions don't click for me, but it's nice to see a good variety in this problem space.

People shy from Nix because of supposed complexity but it really is the only real solution to this sort of problem. It's not really that much more difficult to learn, and in fact if you are willing, AI works really well generating nix config.

A agree, Nix is very doable. With Deepseek or other cheaper models, you could get a whole headache-free setup done in one weekend for a few cents on the dollar.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#96

Post by arianvanp »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #40
drdexebtjl wrote: post #5

I had similar problems with GNU Stow, but switched to Nix and Home Manager instead. I think Chezmoi's templates and file naming conventions don't click for me, but it's nice to see a good variety in this problem space.

[flagged]

Your second example i dont understand what you're getting at.

This is just a mechanism for the builder to inject credentials during fetch time. The derivation is still content addressed (it's a fixed output derivation).

The derivation isn't even marked as impure or whatever. There is just an environment variable that gets injected by the builder into the build env so you can authenticate.

This is required to talk to hugging face

What are you on about?

Or do you mean that the cas address of HF should directly be addreessable in nix itself?

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#97

Post by ivanjermakov »

technojamin wrote: post #92

I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years, but I originally started off by rolling my own dotfiles setup with a Git repo about 6 years ago: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment I don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need (per-machine config, secrets, templating), but I get a deep satisfaction from the fact that I understand eve…

Same, I wrote a simple program reading master file and copying dotfiles according to "recipes" in it.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#98

Post by c-hendricks »

blop wrote: post #41

I use syncthing to automatically sync my dotfiles git directory across PC/laptops, and stow to manually update symlinks when I add a new dotfile (the content of existing dotfiles is synced by syncthing already) That way I don't have to remember to commit+push+pull changes to existing dotfiles (like bashrc or vimrc which I edit often) to sync them to other machines, it happens automatically in almost real time as soon…

This is what I did too. My dotfiles used a custom install process that didn't really handle ~/.config very well, so I switched to stow, and then added syncthing because the push + pull dance got too annoying. Really happy with it.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#100

Post by reinitctxoffset »

arianvanp wrote: post #96
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your second example i dont understand what you're getting at. This is just a mechanism for the builder to inject credentials during fetch time. The derivation is still content addressed (it's a fixed output derivation). The derivation isn't even marked as impure or whatever. There is just an environment variable that gets injected by the builder into the build env so you can authenticate. This is required to talk to…

I understand in considerable detail what's happening here, having written a conforming implementation of `nix` myself.

Silently smuggling environment variables into a builder means the build is not reproducible, nor is it possible to know a-priori whether the build is reproducible. Nix reverts to the same level of guarantee you get from Ubuntu or whatever without the convenience of Ubuntu: Docker is dramatically more principled!

The galaxy brain people who do real mathematics of whom I am merely a humble fan worked this one out. The credential is a "coffect", which is a generalization of this sort of thing that is tracked ("graded") and accounted for ("discharged"), a process that allows you to reason about your system (to for example know that a massive build is going to be useless before you do it since you don't have the credential for the model you were trying to run with the thing you built).

Punching random holes in Nix is worse than just disabling the sandbox or whatever other BDSM thing, because if you aren't going to get correct you might as well get easy.

Why put up with Nix's bullshit if it's still going to be less correct than Docker anyways? Most people agree (c.f. Docker as opposed to Nix winning too hard in the market).

My approach is different: unfuck Nix.

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