devhugo

You're right. I read your comment and thought it was in reference to the thought of an Inter Planetary network, not realizing you were talking about a present day usecase. Sorry. I've actually heard about IPFS being used by some private cloud/on prem operators to speed up delivery of container images.

I believe that is their point.

I migrated to this new setup slowly. First of all, I think separating things out from the main Nixpkgs repo is valuable, particularly for this whole new scope of user configuration. Based on what you've written I think you may be missing part of the power of home-manager. Worst case scenario, this is how I manage neovim, you can just write a file that sources a bunch of local files into the correct location on your computer. See https://github.com/HugoReeves/nix-home/tree/master/program/e... ```nix { config, lib, pkgs, ... }: { xdg.configFile."nvim/coc-settings.json".source = ./configs/coc-settings.json; xdg.configFile."nvim/fixers.vimrc".source = ./configs/fixers.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/flags.vimrc".source = ./configs/flags.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/general.vimrc".source = ./configs/general.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/init.vimrc".source = ./configs/init.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/init.vim".source = ./configs/init.vim; xdg.configFile."nvim/keys.vimrc".source = ./configs/keys.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/lsp.vimrc".source = ./configs/lsp.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/status-line.vimrc".source = ./configs/status-line.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/themes.vimrc".source = ./configs/themes.vimrc; xdg.configFile."nvim/vista.vimrc".source = ./configs/vista.vimrc; } ``` So at worst it's an overly complicated way to source files into your home directories. However with the home-manager supported configuration it's much better in my opinion.

In regards to the problems. 1. I totally agree. Everyone using Nix has seen this as an issue for a while, and I'm not entirely sure how it can be fixed in the near term. I would say that Nix is for people who love to tinker and enjoy spending time on this sort of thing. If that's you, go to the riot chat or the subreddit and ask questions there. r/nixos 2. Haven't seen gluon before, interesting. Nix is functional which is key and it's focus as a configuration language offers it some great advantages when used for configuration. I believe a gluon is not feasible as it's not functional. The Nix team seems open to changing parts of the language to improve it, they are looking at removing the special url syntax for example. 3. No comment. I haven't really looked at this space. Nixpkgs if that is what you are referring to is pretty well maintained, particularly for the configuration-less executables.

Interesting. Home manager will enable you to manage your dotfiles. The more interesting proposition comes from Nix. I've absolutely loved using it in general and run NixOS by choice as my desktop OS. The great thing about using Nix and Home Manager to manage dotfiles is that your configuration is defined in a programming langauge. You have broad scope to control things based on whatever environment you are deploying the files to. It's a really powerful solution, it just takes a bit more time than some other dotfile systems. Give Home Manager a go if you have time to tinker, and if you have questions feel free to contact me through my email on my homepage.

I've looked at and read about other's experiences with stow in the past. I'm uncertain about this so please correct me where I am wrong, but the issues I see with stow are: 1. It's somewhat dated/may have a tail of legacy features 2. I'm unsure of it's value beyond of what can be provided via the Git Bare Repo solution linked in the intro of my post. 3. More importantly, it's not a programmable solution where you can override default files based on the current system. The main value proposition I see in my system is that I can define a single default configuration for, say, my terminal Alacritty, and override the configuration where necessary based on either my user, machine or role. Nix is a programming language, so I essentially have my system configuration managed via a programming language and can control things with a great level of detail.

That's certainly one option. The unique thing about dotfiles is that everyone has a different 'best solution'. The setup outlined in my post has the advantage of being highly configurable and programmable. However, for some people it might make more sense to use a plain git repo with symlinks as installing Nix on all their devices could be a nonstarter. I'm curious, what do you use to manage tools that don't have a `source $SOME_PATH` option. Do you symlink?