Allow to specify where the cloned repo will be placed

[sanbor]

It's important to consider the following situation in the current implementation:

fresh bbatsov/prelude . --file=~/.emacs.d/
rm -rf ~/.fresh/build/emacs.d/personal
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/emacs/personal ~/.fresh/build/emacs.d/personal
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/emacs/prelude-conf/prelude-modules.el ~/.fresh/build/prelude-modules.el

This won't work because the cloned repository is in ~/.fresh/build.new until the fresh command ends, so the symbolic links won't work.

Because that is important to have a --location argument.

Maybe it's against fresh philosophy to have things outside .fresh dir, but I would like to do something like:

fresh bbatsov/prelude . --location=~/.prelude --file=~/.emacs.d/ --writable
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/emacs/personal ~/.prelude/personal
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/emacs/prelude-conf/prelude-modules.el ~/.prelude/prelude-modules.el

--location is the place where the cloned repo will be placed
--file is where the link will be placed
--writable indicates that is ok to make changes in that repository

If the writable option is specified, then fresh should just do git pull instead of rewriting the whole directory.

[sanbor]

I like your solution! What about doing git pull in the repo during fresh update when was defined with a --writable option? Or maybe another flag, like --keep-files

[jasoncodes]

I see the potential for a feature which symlinks direct out of ~/.fresh/source. --writable is not what it would be called (this is something else). Perhaps something along the lines of --direct? It would only work with --file. Naming suggestions welcome.

With fresh_after_build this new feature could easily be faked. Add a dummy fresh bbatsov/prelude README.md --file=prelude-keep line which refers to the repo you care about will keep it from being removed by fresh clean. You could then use fresh_after_build to link directly to the source repo with ln -sf ~/.fresh/source/bbatsov/prelude ~/.emacs.d, followed by any other symlinks you wish to make out of ~/.dotfiles.

[twe4ked]

@sanbor I forgot to comment on this the other day. We added the fresh_after_build callback, let us know how it goes!

[sanbor]

👍