Dotfuse.py

This is a simple little fuse fs. It is designed to make the problem of composability in dotfiles solvable. Basically many configs "suck" when viewed in light of the notion of include, repetition, environment/context aware issues and so on. What this brings to the table is a full templating engine, jinja2. Now you can compose otherwise monolithic config files, and make them much more powerful.

To run this you need python-fuse installed, as well as jinja2 (thats it!)

Here is how it works. (still experimental right now!)

Create two directories in your homedir called .dotfs/ and dotfstest/

These directories are the "backing" filesystem and the "test target" respectively. The backing fs exists to house the files we actually work with. This needs to be independant of the mounted fs (different location!) to avoid crazy unionfs type issues. The "test target" dir exists mostly becasue I am scared to start trying in my actual home directory for now :P.

What happens is the dotfuse just uses fuse mechanisms to wrap the basic functionality of the host FS. But, on file flush the system will recompile the templates associated with the relevant dotfile, and put them in the target dir.

To make this work, just do:

python dotfuse.py $mountpoint

Then cd into $mountpoint. For each dotfile you wish to compose, create a directory _dotfile/

For instance, this means that if you want .foorc composable, create a directory _foorc/

In that directory you can setup whatever filestructure you wish, using jinja2 style templating. You won't get to pass in a context right now tho (this will maybe be fixed...). There is one required file however... in the example above this would be:

foorc

This file is what is loaded as the "template master", aka the tempalte on which the render() function is called.

Once any file is written in _foorc the fs searches for foorc and runs that template. If this does not result in an error, the target dir ~/dotfstest/ will now contain a file .foorc