Scow

Unfinished

Not safe for work

All contributions and advice are more than welcome.

scow aims at quickly gathering and deploying config files.

The idea is to collect all the config files disseminated in your computer you want to have a quick access to in a .dotfiles directory in you home folder. Then you should be able to git clone your dotfiles repo and have scow deploy all the files at the right place so programs can use it.

scow should allow you to download your config file backup with git, radicle or whatever and have them placed in the right spot, overwriting or making a backup if a file with the same name already exists.

Ideally in the future scow should allow you deploy your config files on a system and give the possibility to restore the config files it replaced.

This is mostly an exercise to teach myself system calls in C and itch my itch but any new ideas welcome.

scow should stay KISS and work out of the box.

License is GPLv3 cause Linux saved my old computers from the trash and make the new one shine and because I feel like I owe a lot to the Free Softawre movement.

How it (is supposed to) work

There are four modes. Those are temporary names. Maybe I'll change them for load, unload, dump, sailaway or something related to scows.

Collect mode

scow takes a file and create a hard link in a ~/.dotfiles directory or takes a directory and reproduces the directory structure recursively with hard links. For each hard link that is created a hidden .scow file is also created alongside to store the path the original file came from.

Deploy mode

Deploy your dotfiles at the right spot by reading the hidden .scow files and make a backup if file already exist. If there is two or backup files, you should be prompted.

Invade mode

Same as deploy mode but overwrite config files already present.

Takeoff mode

Restore files that were there before deployment.

Usage

scow [mode] file_or_dir  ...

Why hard links and not copy ?

Because it allows to manage all dotfiles from ~/dotfiles directly.

Why not use symbolic link ?

Because git don't follow symbolic links (anymore). I hear they can't span across filesystems... Well my laptop has only one drive and one main partition. Maybe they could be used in deploy mode (non-destructive), could fit the job better maybe.

Is there a link with GNU stow ?

I have to admit I wanted a simple program to be able to collect dotfiles in the same place so I can git push them in the clouds and then easily deploy them on a new machine, eventually non-destructively so I can just then -swoosh- disappear and restore it to how it was. So i stumbled upon GNU stow, but I did not grok it after five minutes of reading so I went with my own thing. I am no genius, just trying to get better at programming with system calls in C and to scratch my itch.

Dependencies

The fantastic Antirez's SDS library is extensively used. So familiarize yourself with it before looking at the source code. I just added it as a git submodule to this repo. [https://github.com/antirez/sds]

TODO

Write make_backup for deploy mode
How to handle if there is already a backup files created by scow ? (Ask the user to choose ?)
Write takeoff mode
Check for allocation failures everywhere
Offer an option to change the .dotfiles location ?
Write tests ? (How ?) I'd love to use criterion. Run test in container.

cassepipe/scow