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majewsky
system-configuration
Shell2016–2023
majewsky / system-configuration

system-configuration

Configuration for my Arch Linux systems, using Holo configuration management

2Distinct people
22Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
17GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Configuration for my Arch Linux systems, using Holo configuration management

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

If you're willing to learn, then definitely. When doing it for the first time, you should be prepared to take your time and go through the installation guide paragraph for…

majewsky used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year22 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-01-19 15:21:28 UTC to 2023-02-21 09:32:24 UTC.

024682016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

22 sources
I have a similar toolchain, fully using native system packages, built around Holo [1] as a config management tool and holo-build [2] as a distro-independent package building tool. In the intended state, the root configuration package (e.g. [3] for my desktop PC) is the only explicitly installed package on the system. [1] https://holocm.org [2] https://github.com/holocm/holo-build [3] https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master...
In In Praise of Alpine and APK
You can get 99% of what configuration management does by just building a configuration package. 1. If you want an application installed, list it as a dependency of your configuration package. 2. If you want a configuration file installed, put it in your configuration package. 3. If you want a user account or group, put a config file for systemd-sysusers in your configuration package. I built a tool that simplifies package building for this particular purpose, where you're just listing dependencies and file contents: https://github.com/holocm/holo-build - As an example, this is the configuration package for my notebook: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/418282... The nice thing about this approach, compared to switching to something like NixOS, is that you can continue to use your favorite distribution. However, when yo
Read the rest
u go by this route, you will run into a brick wall very fast because you cannot install a configuration file into a path where an application package already installed an example config. I built http://holocm.org for this purpose. It works well enough, even though it has a few quirks at times. It's fundamentally limited by the system package manager having the final say in everything. Since January, I've been slowly migrating my servers to NixOS. The desktop and the notebook might follow at some point. NixOS certainly has enough quirks on its own, but at last the configuration management is a first-class citizen on my servers.
In Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?
I use XMPP for this purpose: https://github.com/majewsky/xmpp-bridge Service units then look like this: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master... (the "with-xmpp-bridge" helper script is near the top of the same file) The advantage of XMPP is that it can interactively ask me for confirmation, e.g. when installing upgrades, and that an XMPP server like Prosody is vastly simpler to set up than a mail server.
In Error Reporting from Your Systemd Automation
> So, this is an honest question, not an attempt to be cruel: How exactly do you get that to happen? The other answer is way better than mine, but I will add what I also said elsewhere in this thread: In 99% of cases, Pulse just works. In 1% of cases, it fails in catastrophic, bizarre and utterly undebuggable ways. I have the luck of being in the 99%. I just installed and started Avahi and selected "Make network sound devices available locally" (or whatever the option is called) in paprefs. That's for the client part. For the server part, see https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master... (that's for Arch Linux, package names etc. might differ between distributions).
In PulseAudio under the hood
majewsky·May 31, 2017Recommendation phrase
If you're willing to learn, then definitely. When doing it for the first time, you should be prepared to take your time and go through the installation guide paragraph for paragraph to make sure you're not skipping some obscure, yet important step. Also, since there are a lot of standard steps involved, I recommend that you document what you're doing, either as a plain text file of notes, or as some sort of configuration management playbook/recipe/template. I started doing that two years ago and it really took the pain out of bringing up new Arch systems, or reinstalling existing ones: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration
In Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with?

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