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Requirements

A brief list of requirements so we understand what the solution will look like:

  • Configuration MUST be versioned publicly.

    • Versioned for all the goodness that comes with it (tracking why a
      particular changes landed, when, in which context.)
    • I want to be part of an open ecosystem. I want to contribute to the set
      of configurations that Internet strangers can look up on GitHub and learn from. ("path:*.nix something" is a regular GitHub search query of mine when I develop on Nix / NixOS).

  • System deployments or new machine installs MUST be reproducible and deterministic.

    • Importantly, if I deploy my system at a given Git revision, I get exactly the same output everytime. This allows for trivial pain-free rollbacks.

  • Updates (security updates, OS updates, individual software version updates) MUST not break my systems.

    • Critical security updates MUST apply at least weekly.
    • If a new version of a dependency becomes incompatible with my configuration, the deploy step SHOULD fail before changing my systems. When this is not feasible, rollbacks to an earlier Git revision MUST be a viable recovery path.

Non-functional:

  • It SHOULD be easy for me to adhere to my philosophy and modeling principles, separating data/state into one of my 6 pre-defined categories.