Keeping Linux Nodes in Agreement

Keeping several machines configured is an excellent way to discover how many subtly different versions of a shell environment one person can accumulate.

Chezmoi is the configuration-management tool used for part of the Brokentooth setup. The repository records shared shell fragments, wrappers and node-specific choices so they can be applied deliberately instead of reconstructed from memory.

Shared configuration, explicit differences

A common baseline is useful, but a phone running Termux and a desktop workstation do not have identical requirements. The documented setup selects node-specific configuration rather than assuming every machine should receive the same environment unchanged.

It also uses a marked shell hook to load managed fragments instead of replacing an entire existing shell configuration. That makes the boundary easier to inspect: here is the managed part, and here is the environment it joins.

The repository's design excludes credentials and runtime state from the synchronized configuration. That is a design rule and a set of ignore boundaries, not proof that every historical commit or machine has received a complete security audit. I want the configuration to describe how a secret is consumed without making the secret part of the configuration archive.

The benefit is fairly unglamorous. A wrapper, a profile or a shell setting has a place to live and an explanation that can survive the machine it was first written on. That does not eliminate drift; it gives me something concrete to compare the drift against.