Okay, so I’ve been reading about dotfile management apps such as GNU Stow, and I love the idea. I have a good grasp on how it works. Seems like it should work flawlessly for corralling all my dotfiles into one folder so I can easily clone them across machines. Makes sense for apps whose config folders and files are named something static like ~/.config/appname/settings.conf.
That said, can somebody help me understand the cloning/syncing workflow for apps that generate folders and/or files with dynamic/random/inconsistent names? For example, I’m thinking of Firefox, which creates folders with seemingly random strings for each profile.
Do I just need to clone my Firefox profiles before I launch Firefox for the first time on a new machine? Can I configure GNU Stow w/ something like *.Profile for the top level folder name? Am I doomed to manually syncing my Firefox settings, or is there some other trick for handling these dynamically named configs that I haven’t come across in the tutorials yet? This little cliff hanger is pretty much the last thing stopping me from installing GNU Stow at this point. Thank you!
Stow cannot do this as far as I know. Chezmoi can though you’ll need to fiddle with templates and ignores to achieve it:
https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/manage-machine-to-machine-differences/#handle-different-file-locations-on-different-systems-with-the-same-contents
However as others have said a dotfile manager may not be appropriate for all apps. It assumes a certain kind of behaviour of the app - known config locations, text files etc.
I think your suggestion to backup/clone/restore your ideal Firefox config onto new machines is probably most practical if you do want to use a dotfile manager with it. That way you ensure the dir name is the same across all machines. Then you can use stow to manage parts of the profile going forward.
I would consider FF’s own sync solution also though - I believe you can self-host it too.