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ajlende / dotbot-pacaur

dotbot pacaur plugin
MIT License
4 stars 4 forks source link

Feature request: Flatten lists prior to passing to plugins so that yaml anchors can be used #2

Closed dsifford closed 7 years ago

dsifford commented 7 years ago

Hello,

Posting this request here from anishathalye/dotbot#122

My request is fairly simple. I'm in a situation where I'm jumping between a macbook and a linux machine and I'm using both dotbot-pacuar and dotbot-brew to maintain a list of my packages for both machines.

The lists contain, for the most part, the same exact packages with a few here and there differences.

Currently, there's no way to use reference anchors in the plugin yaml file so I have to write my package lists like this:

- pacaur:
  - package1
  - package2
  - package3
  - package4
  - package5
  - linux-specific1

- brew:
  - package1
  - package2
  - package3
  - package4
  - package5
  - mac-specific1
  - mac-specific2

As you can see, there's a lot of unnecesary repeats between both lists.

What I'd like to do instead is this:

- &common
  - package1
  - package2
  - package3
  - package4
  - package5

- pacaur:
  - *common
  - linux-specific1

- brew:
  - *common
  - mac-specific1
  - mac-specific2

This almost works right now, but the hangup is that dotbot doesn't first flatten the lists prior to passing them to the plugins. So what the plugins end up getting is this:

- pacaur:
  -
    - package1
    - package2
    - package3
    - package4
    - package5
  - 
    - linux-specific1

- brew:
  - 
    - package1
    - package2
    - package3
    - package4
    - package5
  - 
    - mac-specific1
    - mac-specific2

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for considering! 😄

ajlende commented 7 years ago

Hi, thank you for the well-written description of your issue, and sorry it's taken me so long to get around to addressing it.

I actually modeled dotbot-pacaur partly after dotbot-brew, so they both handle things pretty similarly. I would expect the config below to work since dotbot-pacaur and dotbot-brew both use a for-in loop iterate over the the values of a list which also just so happens to work on the keys of a dict.

- &common
  ? package1
  ? package2

- pacaur:
  <<: *common
  ? linux-specific1

- brew:
  <<: *common
  ? mac-specific1

This takes advantage of the merge key (<<) in YAML which joins maps since there isn't an equivalent for lists.

The downside with this is that you'll be getting an error when you run it.

Action package1 not handled
Action package2 not handled

This is a side-effect of how the YAML files are parsed. The &common anchor will be treated as a list of directives that Dotbot will try to run.

To get around the problem you could call the common one brew or pacaur and remove the merge key like below which doesn't look great, but will fix the error.

- pacaur: &common
  ? package1
  ? package2

- pacaur:
  ? linux-specific1

- brew:
  <<: *common
  ? mac-specific1

Let me know if this works. I haven't been able to try it out on the linux side of things yet, but it seems to work on my MacBook with brew. If it does work, I'll add it to the README so other people trying to do this can find a solution more easily.

dsifford commented 7 years ago

@ajlende Good idea! Just gave the last format you suggested a try on my linux machine and it works like a charm with no warnings. 👍 🎉

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction 😄

ajlende commented 7 years ago

Glad to hear it worked!