Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)

Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday August 11, 2022 @04:33PM (#32431359)

I find text configs very friendly up until the point that a package manager blows away my changes. This system harks from an era before fully automated software updates when a full time employed sysadmin was expected to manually oversee every single update. It's far easier to automate incremental changes to a binary database than to non-destructively modify a free form text file.

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by pxc on Friday August 12, 2022 @02:06AM (#32435152)

> I find text configs very friendly up until the point that a package manager blows away my changes.

Neither of these is a complete answer, but

1. Distros like NixOS and GuixSD address this successfully by emitting the config files themselves. They don't statefully edit your configs but instead store them in their own language and then translate them as wholes.

2. You can mitigate much of the pain of this with something like etckeeper, which essentially gives you version control for /etc.

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