Subject: Re: Dot file layout for ‘home-dotfiles-service’

From: paul <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2024 01:44:13 +0100

Hi Ludo',

On 2/7/24 23:17, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Oops, my sincere apologies if I ended up “fixing” something that was in
> fact intentional, effectively breaking it.
Don't worry I think there's been a misunderstanding from the beginning 
and I was not able to explain myself . Sh*t happens :)
> Should we just adjust the manual to match
> this?
I think that doing so would defeat the original purpose of supporting 
the de facto standard used by Stow users
> Or the other way around, at the cost of breaking user config?
This is really about what one means by breaking, we already received a 
bug report at https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68848 which in my opinion 
indicates that we give some expectations through the manual, which is 
not met by the code (I'm adding Janneke to this thread so that we are 
all aligned and can reach consensus).
>   Or adding an option to choose between these two layouts?
This is the best option forward, in my opinion. It is flexible and 
allows for a both for the current simplified layout (without the 
per-application layer of directories typical of Stow) and the Stow 
default one.

If there's consensus my next steps would be:

1. Apply Janneke's stylistic suggestion at 
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68857 allowing us to close 
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68848 and align the code with the manual

2. Add a layout field to home-dotfiles-configuration that allows for the 
simplified layout described by Ludo' in his last email, something like this

$ guix shell tree -- tree -a dot-files/
dot-files/
├── .dico
├── .gitconfig
├── .gnupg
│   ├── dirmngr.conf
│   ├── gpa.conf
│   ├── gpg.conf
│   └── .gpg-v21-migrated
├── .Xdefaults
└── .xsession

the default would be the current layout but this would allow for more 
flexibility in layouts in the future.

3. Possibly add an included-applications (the name is just a proposal) 
to support Sergey's use case of selecting a subset of application 
dotfiles to provision in the user's home

what do you think about this plan?

thank you all for your help and your time

giacomo