It's always there, in the far corners of the early maps [1]:
Here be dragons.
Uncharted regions where travelers dare to tread. From very early on, my dotfiles have felt the same to me. Namely, not as well maintained as they should be because trying to keep them up-to-date across multiple machines running different OS's was a first-rate nightmare. Recently, I realised that this needed to change. I began researching different ways to fix this, and came across Nix. I was put off at first. It seemed an overly heavy and complex system for what I wanted to achieve, a bit like driving a small nail with a sledgehammer. Several months later, as I coaxed MacPorts through another OS update, it all clicked. I went back to Nix and was immediately in love. I'm now convinced this tool is how St. George slayed the dragon [2].
| [1] | {-} No, seriously, this really happened! Well, at least once... |
| [2] | {-} Clearly, Dragon Hill is an ancient terminal that George used to install Nix. |
Though it has improved by leaps and bounds recently, the documentaion about nix has been historically lacking. I found myself struggling for answers on many points, trolling through old forums and threads to glean what information I could. To help myself remeber, I started keeping notes. Eventually, I realised that I should track them with git, so I don't lose them. Which lead to me concluding that I should write them up properly, in case other could benefit. So come along as we explore the delightful, and occassionally mind-numbingly frustrating, world of reproducible dotfiles with nix.