A set of programs to bootstrap my personal computing setup.
I had previously used these three repos to automate my setup, which use the following tools:
- https://github.com/seanfisk/personal-chef-repo (Chef)
- https://github.com/seanfisk/dotfiles (Waf)
- https://github.com/seanfisk/emacs (Waf)
I have learned several lessons from this:
- Chef is a massive amount of complexity. It might be worthwhile for DevOps, but when you are only managing several personal machines, a scripted approach is sufficient.
- Waf requires a Python development environment and doesn't work perfectly for something like configuring and installing a personal setup.
At my core, I am a programmer, and I want everything the way I want it. Instead of using prescriptive tools like Chef and Waf, I think it will be simpler to have a program that does everything that is necessary exactly as I've instructed, and nothing more.
This also removes the decision of where to put customizations. The emacs repo was fairly obvious, but the distinction between personal-chef-repo and dotfiles grew increasingly unclear.
A program has been built for each environment, currently:
- Personal laptop (this repository)
- Work laptop (private repository stored at work)
- https://github.com/tiiiecherle/osx_install_config
- https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos
- https://gist.github.com/brandonb927/3195465
- Good technique for determining what preferences changed: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/457024