Dotbot 2.0

This issue is meant for tracking work on Dotbot v2.0, the first major release since v1.0 in March 2014. All features that are backwards compatible are being included in Dotbot v1.0 as they are added. We’ll only switch to the name “v2.0” if/when we decide to add features that are not backwards compatible.

Completed features

• Directive plugins (see #65)
• Default options (see #34 and #77)

Accepted features / changes

• Improved error messages (see #73)
• Backup (see #90)

Features under consideration

• CLI flag to only run certain sections (see #44 and #49, 2nd item)
• Platform specific link paths (see #57)
• Be able to write to files/folders that require special privileges (see #49, 3rd item)
• Uninstall command to delete symlinks specified in install config (see #49, 4th item)
• Automatic backup / replacement of dotfiles (see #12 and #36)
• Support interactive execution (see #74)
• Make Dotbot usable as a Python library (see #75)

Rejected features

(none)

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Design decisions

(nothing here yet)

To be discussed

• What file format do we want to use? There are a couple options I can think of: JSON/YAML file (declarative), other data format (e.g. HOCON), or Python DSL. Maybe there are other completely different ways to do it too.
• Because people use Dotbot as a submodule, we need to be careful when figuring out how to ship the upgrade. Should it be on the master branch? Should Dotbot 2.0 forever live in a 2.0 branch with master being reserved for bugfixes for 1.0?

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Release information

The release date is currently unknown. Work on Dotbot v2.0 has not started yet.

(This top post will be edited as stuff happens. This issue will be used for discussing the design of v2.0.)

[bbenne10]

One feature that dotbot 1.0 lacks is ootb support for encrypting secrets. For instance, I’d love to be able to checkin my zshenv file, but it contains a couple of environment variables that define my identity on pushover. A plugin to use gpg to deal with these secets might be nice.

Then again - stuff like blackbox exists. So maybe dotbot doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel?

[nshtg]

Tbh in my opinion setting up your server/pc (installing vim etc) should not be handled in your dotfiles anyways. Use something like ansible (or a simple bash script) for that.