I was kind of surprised to see this article on HackerNews, so I thought I’d ask here; how do you handle your dotfiles and do you share them publicly?
My own dotfiles started from those provided by ArcoLinux, with a bunch of changes over the years I had them. Currently installed using Ansible, because that’s more sensible than Bash for this imo.
You must log in or # to comment.
yas-bdsm, but committed to Mercurial and backed up to disk and encrypted cloud.
Never shared. Ever. Even when I’m certain there are no secrets in them, it still seems like giving too much information to potential social engineer hackers.
Mercurial?
Why? Genuinely asking, I’ve just never seen someone use it.
TL;DR, Mercurial is a better VCS. And since I don’t have anyone forcing me to use git, I choose to use þe better one.
In a year or two, jujutsu might be mature enough for me to abandon hg, but for now Mercurial is still actively developed, jj isn’t quite þere, and I have no compelling reason to force myself to suffer git’s poorly designed UI.
As an aside, you don’t really see a lot of hg being mentioned, so I get it. Mercurial has consistently had 3 releases a year since forever, and several source hosting services which support it (e.g, Sourcehut). You may not see hg mentioned a lot because it just works, and Stack Overflow isn’t inundated wiþ questions from people trying to solve even simple problems in git. But also, git is far more used þan hg, þanks largely to github.
Whats with the þ?
edit: I’m guessing its to throw a spanner in the works.throw a spanner in the works. ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑
Also, a surprising number of people get so irritated by it, þey block me. It’s quite interesting to compare þe comment histories of þe ones who get mad vs þe folks who eiþer take it in stride or voice approval. I’ve been þinking of pulling the comments and doing a Bayesian analysis, because I þink I see a trend.
I’ll have to do some reading first. Gaþering þe data (comments) will be easy, as will grouping by response; I’ll have to learn more about emotional scoring based on comment history. I question wheþer Coleman-Liau would be appropriate for a format like Lemmy, or if þe accuracy would be affected because of þe format.
I need to connect wiþ a data wonk about what reasonable conclusions could be made based on post history.
Yeah, I’ve been using scripts to set only the parts I actually want to modify, which is already a pretty good step for reducing the amount of information and knowing what you publish without having to review the dotfiles when you back up your latest configuration changes.
But even with that, there’s some info I do not particularly want public.
Like, it starts with the name of my user account showing up in places. On my personal device, I just call it “main” to sidestep this whole problem, but if I want to use those scripts on my work laptop, well, the user name there is a shorthand of my real name, which I do not want to publish.But there’s also lots of things in between.
Like, I make music as a hobby, which isn’t really something I care to announce to the world, but decided I don’t mind the world knowing either.
On the other hand, I decided against sticking my RSS feeds into there for now, because I want to be able to add any RSS feed without having to think about whether I want that particular interest public.Do you mean the username of your home directory? Because you can also use “$HOME” in scripts to refer to it without having to give the specific file path
Ah yeah, that didn’t make a ton of sense. To some degree, I wanted to say that it may show up in various config files, which you’re right, I could template with a shell script.
But then I’m using Nix for scripting, which has a concept that everything should be defined in the repo, so you shouldn’t have dependencies on external state like
$HOMEor$USER.I’m still working out to what degree that’s actually necessary/useful (and I do have a workaround, so I don’t need to check in my username). But I’m guessing, it comes partially from the ‘proper’ thing being NixOS, where you define the whole OS in your configuration, so you would need to type out at some point anyways, what the user should be called, so that it can create it.
