frontear / dotfiles Goto Github PK

For the longest time, I've had a strange mental block where no code I wrote ever felt enough. It never felt right, it never felt good. I was plagued with these feelings, always desiring to do better, but never defining what better looked like, just this abstract idea created solely to diminish the value of my own code.

This project has felt much of the same, and always, my first reaction was to rm -rf it all. "Begin anew!" I thought, this time I'll write it different. spoiler: I would eventually feel the same.

I want to grow past this mindset, and it starts here. Instead of erasing the repo, I will meticulously pick out the things I want, the things I need, compare them to my old dotfiles especially, the archlinux ones, and create them in a way that I am proud of, that I won't diminish.

Make no mistake, this will not be easy, but I will try my best. Throughout, I will lay down some ideas that I have for how I'd like to shape this repo, and how I'd like to have it be.

I think this could be an awesome exercise into defining good types and reducing the complexity of the module overall. This is a very low-priority thing though.

Having a wrapper that then needs to be referenced directly through config.main-user.name is a digusting hack and I'd rather not need it at all. Honestly a complete waste of the module system and accomplish nothing more than holding the information of another module, like a variable + function callback.

I have 2 ideas that I could attempt, both arguably more "nix-y" and a lot better.

The first idea is to have a meta attribute set, perhaps either as an import, a flake output, or simply a specialAttr input passed in for every module. This will contain information about hostnames, timezones, locale, usernames, stateVersion, and possibly more.

The second idea is to leverage the NixOS attribute of users.users and create a users.users.main-user with all the properties set. Problem with this is that it introduces repetition because the nixpkgs issue still stands with infinite recursion, so I would need to manually set home-manager and environment.persistence. Not ideal.

No idea which way I want to go but it's a good consideration.

For one, I manage home-manager through system configurations anyways, so creating a nixos module is probably the best approach.

Secondly, my main concern, is that the way I'm managing home-manager is a bit.. unfortunate. Having to do home-manager.users.frontear = { ... }; is not my ideal way to do it. If anything, I'd prefer to simply have a wrapped module that accomplishes the same thing.

How do I plan to go about this? Probably use systemd.tmpfiles to create and link files from the store into the various home locations.