HomeDir
Manage your home directory!
What is homedir?
HomeDir is a package manager for your home directory.
You can use other peoples HomeDir repositories or create your own!
Requirements
- Ruby (1.8.7 or newer) or JRuby (1.6.0)
Quick Start
gem install homedir
That's it!
Support
You can find me on freenode's IRC servers as the user 'docwhat'. I'm usually on the #homedir channel.
The Story So Far…
Since about 1999 I've been keeping my home directory config files in CVS. As the number of config files I've been storing has grown and as the number of different systems I use it on (my work desktop, my home desktop, my laptop, Gerf, my pda) increases. As the complexity has grown it has become harder to maintain.
So, I started looking around for a better solution. I noticed that SVN is a much better version control system. I was already familiar with stow as well. So I tinkered around with combining them.
And thus homedir was born!
Since then, I rewrote HomeDir completely in python. This gives me more control over the help and error messages. I can do better when conflicts arrive. As well as I can add an elementry package format, which allows me to solve the problem that uninstalling a stow package can take forever if you have a lot of directories in your home.
A friend pointed out that the most important part was the package manager. The various .dotfiles are interesting to look at, but most people have their own. So I moved just the package manager portion to github
Migrating from older versions of homedir
2.x
I'm working on the migration stuff.
1.x
If you've using the pre-2.0 version of HomeDir (hosted on trac.gerf.org) then you should back up your .homedir directory before running the above setup.py script.
The main change is that everything in ~/.homedir/files has been moved to ~/.homedir/packages and the packages will no longer be automatically updated.
Change Log
3.x
- Rewrite in Ruby
- Tons of unit tests
2.x
- Broke out the code to be easier to debug and work with.
- Started adding tests.
- Suggestions on package management from Will Norris.
1.x
The original HomeDir, which was hosted on trac.gerf.org, is going to be considered version 1.
Version 1 had a configuration file that kept track of where your packages were located.
In this new version packages can be placed anyplace under the directory
~/.homedir/packages (except inside another package, of course).
This allows for more flexability for managing packages.
This also means that sync/synccmd is no longer supported.
Similar Ideas
- I have also noticed that Joey Hess has also done something similar and written two articles about it:
- Homebrew does a lot of similar things, but for the system.
- The software package 'stow' also does similar symlinking for package installation. The original algorithm for directories was taken from there.
