Hi all, A while back I was discussing the whole VCS-home stuff with a friend, and we came to the conclusion that there are some real issues with storing dotfiles in a repo. Things like passwords, or company/machine specific paths, internal hosts, etc, can complicate the issue quite a bit. This is particularly true of simple programs that use single, flat, text files for rcfiles. It is very frustrating when you have a file that is 98% the same across hosts, but those differences between the instances are dangerous to leak.
In the programming world, we of course solve this by just putting the sensitive values in a different file, and don't keep it under version control. This is sort of the origin of the whole config file concept to being with :). Programming languages tho, have the idea of include/import, and file reading, and variables, so this becomes easy. This got me thinking: what if we could make config files arbitrarily composable? The result of this thinking, plus some experimentation and coding is dotfuse ( https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse ) which is a little fuse filesystem written in python, that turns directories containing multiple files (in the form of jinja2 templates) into a single dotfile on write to the mounted fs. The backend datastore is a different directory, which can then be kept in vcs, excluding of course the dangerous bits we put in .gitignore (or wherever)! I should note, this is still pretty new, and very experimental -- don't keep real data here! But I sure would appreciate your thoughts, bugfixes, etc on this. Regards, Erich _______________________________________________ vcs-home mailing list vcs-home@lists.madduck.net http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home