TODO

Features

  • Idea from Pietro Abate: Excludes for wildcards, like “all from .cache/* except .cache/duplicity”.

  • $XDG_ related stuff:

  • Honor $XDG_ variables in unburden-home-dir.list for alternative locations of .cache and friends.

These features likely all will need expansion of environment variables in configuration files or values.

The expansion of environment variables in configuration files is implemented since the version 0.4 using String::Expand which is packaged for Debian since recently, but may still be missing in Ubuntu. Still needs to be documented properly, though.

  • Make the dependency on rsync and File::Rsync optional by allowing a mode where only deletion and no moving happens.

Improvements

  • Add warnings if either $HOME or $TARGET do not begin with a slash. This can cause broken symlinks but may also break the test suite. :-)

  • Warning if UNBURDEN_HOME=no or UNBURDEN_HOME=off is set in ~/.unburden-home-dir (which would be for the Xsession.d hook).

  • Sorting subroutines.

  • Call rsync in dry-run mode if unburden-home-dir is called in dry-run mode instead of not calling rsync at all in that case.

  • Don’t run Test::Perl::Critic test by default (but run it on Travis CI). Maybe move it from t/perlcritic.t to xt/perlcritic.t and run the according Make target explicitly via .travis.yml.

  • Make requiring IPC::Run as optional as lsof. Maybe use Module::Load::Conditional, Module::Runtime or Module::Optional for that.

Test Suite Coverage

  • Write test so that mv doesn’t fall into interactive mode. Basically test what the previous commit (“2ec069d Unconditionally move files”) fixed. To reproduce: Have directories to move off as well as a directory which is already moved off.

Planned Default Setting Changes

  • Currently calling unburden-home-dir via Xsession.d is disabled by default and all default list entries are commented, too.

This double disabling is redundant. At most unburden-home-dir’s functionality should be disabled at one of those locations.

Planned Invasive Changes

  • Find a nice way to handle the global unburden-home-dir.list, maybe by using something like /etc/unburden-home-dir.list.d/, /etc/unburden-home-dir/list.d/ or maybe even put symlinks to the (split) example file(s) in there.

I’ve wrote a Perl interface to run-parts named Run::Parts as standalone Perl module which is already used by aptitude-robot, too.

  • Use /usr/share/unburden-home-dir/… for default settings and use /etc/unburden-home-dir* only for settings by the local admin.

See my question about How to make a Dist::Zilla based Perl module (or app) install files into /etc/ on StackOverflow for the reasoning behind this idea.

Deficiencies

  • Slow rsync, e.g. for cache directories.

Documentation Improvements

  • Restructure the documentation in a way that parts of it can be shipped as man pages as well as viewed in the web without contents being duplicated in the source.

Documentation Infrastructure

Status Quo

Currently uses mkdocs (Python) for Markdown-to-HTML-site conversion (also used on ReadTheDocs) and ronn (Ruby) for Markdown-to-Unix-Manual-Page conversion.

Idea

I’d like to switch to POD as primary documentation format to make the software more suitable to distribution via CPAN.

Requirements

  • One single, easy to read and write, Github rendered source format (i.e. Markdown or POD, but no DocBook) for different output formats (primarily HTML and [ng]roff aka Unix man-pages).

  • HTML documents should have an index/ToC of all the documentation, not only a ToC for the current file. (Example: MkDocs, ReadTheDocs)

  • A documentation build should be triggerable via Github Webhook. (Example: ReadTheDocs)

Plan

  • Convert all Markdown files to POD with e.g. Markdown::POD.

  • Replace MkDocs with e.g. Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch, Pod::HtmlEasy or Pod::HtmlTree to generate a bunch of HTML files belonging together. Needs evaluation.

  • Replace ronn with a simple pod2man.

  • Use CGI::Github::Webhook to update a local clone/checkout/working-copy and run the documentation generator.

  • Maybe Pandoc is also an idea. It’ not fulfilling all requirements above, but it would reduce the amount of dependencies because it can convert to HTML as well as [ng]roff.

Possible Existing Implementations