Wherever I May Roam

    Roamer, wanderer
    Nomad, vagabond
    Call me what you will
    
    $ENV{LC_ALL} = "anywhere";
    my $time = localtime;
    say {$anywhere} my $mind;
    local *anywhere = sub { ... };

    Anywhere I roam
    Where I 'git ghclone environment' is $HOME

        # 'grep may_roam($_) => @everywhere', 
        #                with apologies to Metallica

Laziness and a severe addiction to yak shaving conspire to constantly make me tweak configurations and hack scripts to make my everyday editing / shell / development experience as holistic as possible. Unfortunately the same laziness, combined with my constant hopping between home and $work computers, severely gets in the way of effectively using those optimizations. Indeed, although I have those nifty toys installed here and there, because they are not uniformly installed everywhere I constantly find myself using the machines’ functional lowest common denominator.

To fix that, I’ve began to dump all my environment’s custom configurations, plugins, tweaks and hacks on Github. That way, I can import my whole baseline toolbox on any given box with a simple

git clone git://github.com/yanick/environment.git

As an added bonus, it also provides me with a public platform to show off all my little tricks to the world — and a way to potentially let other peeps fork it and customize it to fit their own needs.

However, importing the environment is only half the battle; it also has to be properly installed. On one hand, the installation shouldn’t be manual, as laziness would slip in again and ensure that it would never happen. On the other, I’m too wary of unintentional clobbering to leave everything to an installation script. So I decided to take the middle road and have a set of passive Perl tests verifying if the various components are applied to the environment. For every tweak that I make, I also write a short test that checks that it is installed at the proper place. Thanks the goodness of Perl’s test harness, a quick ’prove t’ is all that is needed to let me know if the current environment is in sync with the baseline:

[yanick@enkidu environment (master)]$ prove t t/general.t … 1/?

Failed test ‘cp bash/mine.bash ~/.bash/mine.bash’

at t/general.t line 15.

+---+---------------------------------------------+---+-----------------------------------------+

| |Got | |Expected |

| Ln| | Ln| |

+---+---------------------------------------------+---+-----------------------------------------+

| 16|source ~/.bash/git-completion.bash | 16|source ~/.bash/git-completion.bash |

| 17|PS1=’[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 ” (%s)“)]\$ ’ | 17|PS1=’[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 ” (%s)“)]\$ ’ |

| 18| | 18| |

19|export PATH=“$PATH:~/work/git-achievements” | |

20|alias git=git-achievements | |

| 21| | 19| |

22|\n | |

| 23|########################### | 20|########################### |

| 24|# Misc | 21|# Misc |

| 25|########################### | 22|########################### |

+---+---------------------------------------------+---+-----------------------------------------+

| 42| | 39| |

| 43|complete -C perldoc_complete perldoc | 40|complete -C perldoc_complete perldoc |

| 44|complete -C perldoc_complete pod | 41|complete -C perldoc_complete pod |

| | 42|\n

| | 43|\n

| | 44|# aliases

| | 45|source ~/.bash/aliases

+---+---------------------------------------------+---+-----------------------------------------+

[ etc… ]

It’s not a perfect system, and there’s still a lot of polishing that can be done, but I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it has already been quite useful.