How to manage my dotfiles better

[chaopeng]

I just write this doc to dump thought in my brain, not sure when I will update how to manage my dotfiles.

Background

I am using this repo (and submodule for nvim, and private repo) to manage across many devices (> 6). Device running in different platforms:

• Arch in WSL
• Arch
• Debain Testing
• Mac

Dotfiles provides me same (mostly) experience across device. And easy setup for new device. Currently, it is based on stow.

Pros / Cons

Pros

• I like the link file idea, I can either edit on dotfile dir or the software config file dir and no need to worry about sync in 1 device.
• dotfiles for each software stores in 1 dir.
• I can use sub modules to store private dotfiles.

Cons

• sub dir is not self contain, all of them depends on the Makefile on root
• platform related config is ugly, use grep suffix, WTF.
  • Maybe have a list on each device to config which subdir should be used, this is also benefit for some device I want to include dotfiles for DE (for example: hyprland).
• some manual steps: eg. gitconfig. seems not much good solution if I don't want t introduce template engine
• a lot of subdirs has .config, dir is deep, and many cli tools ignore hidden files, because stow on ~.
  • Maybe have a file on each subdir to know what dir should map, eg. fish -> ~/.config/fish.
• stow is maybe powerful and it makes the linked result not consistent. eg. if device has ~/.config/fish, link will go down on fish/*, if ~/.config/fish not exists, the link will be fish -> ~/.config/fish. which will make it different when I edit files in ~/.config/fish.
  • Currenly I use some precheck to prevent. Ugly
  • Maybe I am going to build a bazel. LoL

Any Soultion

1. check any tools fix my https://dotfiles.github.io/utilities/
2. build my own, I may prefer this one, it is not much work and fun.

[chaopeng]

If I build my own program to manage the syslink, the first problem need to solve would be broken link. For example:

• ~/dotfiles/bash/.bashrc => ~/.bashrc
• delete ~/dotfiles/bash/.bashrc, ~/.bashrc will be a broken link
• how do we know ~/.bashrc should delete?
• what if the file in deeper dir
• what if we rename ~/dotfiles/bash/.bashrc to ~/dotfiles/bsh/.bashrc, need rebuild the link

To resolve this we need to walk the whole file tree, need to ensure this is not too slow. Also need to ensure, we don't delete the link if it is updated, eg. bsh tasks runs earlier than bash task.