[Request] force - does it overwrite any file? about dotbot

[anishathalye]

Hmm, that's a good point.

Do you think we could have an option like relink: true for overwriting symlinks but not deleting files (so no data loss)? And then the force: true could stay how it is -- it'll remove the file (or link) if necessary. How does this sound?

Default behavior is a little bit more tricky. I definitely agree with you that it'll be a great thing to have, I'm just not sure what's the right interface. Should it go in the config file itself? With the current YAML/JSON format, I'm not sure where that would go. Should it be a command line option? I feel like that might get messy.

Do you have any ideas?

[Ploppz]

relink is a good idea. A suggestion for setting defaults is to put this in the same .yaml file as everything else:

- default:
     force: true

[anishathalye]

relink should be doable.

Currently, the YAML file is declarative.

Adding something like this seems out of place:

- default:
  force: true

Because the "default" is not another action to be executed.

Maybe something like this could be better:

defaults:
  link:
    force: true
  shell:
    stdout: true

config:
  - link:
      ~/.vimrc: vimrc
  - shell:
    - echo hi

But I'm not super happy with that either.

[Ploppz]

Yes that works. One more suggestion that gets rid of two supergroups defaults and config:

- link:
    default:
        force: true
    ~/.vimrc: vimrc

Or maybe that has the potential to crash with a file "default" - maybe - default instead. I don't know so much about yaml syntax. Well that's a suggestions and I'll leave it up to you to decide what you want to do :)

[anishathalye]

Yeah, you're right, that has the potential to clash with the file default. In that context, - default is not actually valid YAML.

[anishathalye]

relink functionality implemented! (3725d21)

The default configuration syntax might have to wait until Dotbot 2.0 (unless someone comes up with a nice way to integrate it into the current design).

[Ploppz]

Hm, it says that it only overrides broken symbolic links. Unless I'm misunderstanding something: What I would need is to override any symbolic link, because my case may be like this:

. (dotfiles directory)
├── dircolors-green
└── dircolors-plumb

And then I would have green.yaml and plumb.yaml which would link .config/dircolors to dotfiles/dircolors-green and dotfiles/dircolors-plumb respectively.

I would say that this behaviour is not destructive, as a symbolic link in itself does not hold a lot of information - there shouldn't be any consequences in most cases.

[anishathalye]

Perhaps my commit message wasn't the best. It does overwrite broken and incorrect symbolic links, behaving the way you described.

[Ploppz]

Ah yes indeed, I think I just misunderstood words. Thanks for implementing it. And sorry for this late reply - this is the first time I actually come back to my dotfiles for a while.

I have a problem: I pulled the latest version; my HEAD is now at commit 53c26ba: "Clean up code". I have a lot of links defined like this:

    ~/.config/theme:
        path: theme-green/
        relink: true

But I still get the Incorrect link error on all of them. I'm wondering if I didn't update dotbot correctly. I went into the dotbot directory and wrote git pull origin master.

[anishathalye]

What's happening is that the Dotbot install script fetches the version of Dotbot that's committed in git. To update to a newer version of Dotbot, run:

git submodule update --init --remote dotbot && git add dotbot

After this, running ./install should work just fine (and then once you check, you can commit the change to your dotfiles).

[Ploppz]

@anishathalye How is it going with default configuration and Dotbot 2.0?

[anishathalye]

Haven't started on it yet.

[Ploppz]

Alright. No hurries.