Request classic confinement for chezmoi

chezmoi (https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi) is a tool for managing your dotfiles (e.g. .bashrc) across multiple machines. It’s becoming quite popular (over 1500 stars in Github). I’ve had a couple of requests to make it available as a snap.

chezmoi needs to read and write arbitrary files in the user’s home directory and therefore needs “classic” confinement. Please can you enable this.

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Gentle ping on this. Is there anything else needed from me for this?

I use this tool, and from what I can see, likely needs classic due to the management of dotfiles.

Any thoughts @evan / @popey / @Wimpress; or roadblocks?

Thank you in advance.

Is this all dotfiles or specific ones?

This is for all dotfiles, and arbitrary other files in the user’s home directory. The exact dotfiles managed are decided by the user and are not known ahead of time.

Gentle ping. Any chance for a response on this?

The requirements are understood. This core functionality of the application is to manage dot files, though I wonder if it would be acceptable to limit them to common dot files (you mentioned .bashrc is typical).

@pedronis - this is not that different from direnv. Please speak up if this shouldn’t proceed.

@advocacy - can you perform the publisher vetting?

Restricting the files that chezmoi can manage would be a very severe limitation. For an example of the files managed you can see my personal dotfiles repo and other people have very different setups. Realistically, any whitelist of files would be both long enough to be effectively unmaintainable and short enough to cripple chezmoi for most users (everyone will use 5% of the items on the whitelist, everyone will use a different 5%, and any uniquely personal config files will be excluded).

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@advocacy - ping again, can you please perform the vetting?

Vetting done, +1 from me on behalf of advocacy.

Granted use of classic. This is now live.

Thanks all for this. chezmoi is now available as a snap package, in the beta channel for now, but in stable once I get a few experience reports.

I only hit one bug related to snap: snap sets the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable to a directory that doesn’t exist, which breaks programs that assume that it already exists (which is pretty much of them that use it). I added a work-around in chezmoi for this, as this seems to be a long-term issue with snap.

Thanks again to everyone who made this happen: @bashfulrobot @jdstrand @popey.

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