mir.qualia
There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective.
—Clarence Irving Lewis
mir.qualia provides a Python 3 script for conditionally commenting and uncommenting blocks in files, for example configuration files (dotfiles). This can be used to keep dotfiles for different machines in a single version control repository and check out the right copy on each machine.
Installation
Installing from PyPI is recommended:
$ pip3 install mir.qualia
Basic usage
qualia is a filter script, so it is used by redirecting stdin and stdout:
$ qualia [qualities...] <infile >outfile
qualia recognizes special blocks (called qualified blocks) and comments or uncomments them. A qualified block looks like this:
# BEGIN laptop export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" # END laptop
The quality of this block is laptop
. If laptop
is given as a quality, then qualia will make sure the contents of the
block are uncommented. If laptop
isn't given as a quality, then
qualia will make sure the contents of the block are commented.
It is possible to pass multiple qualities or no qualities:
$ qualia audio games $ qualia
qualia is idempotent, so you can run it multiple times; only the last time takes effect:
$ qualia <infile | qualia laptop | qualia desktop | qualia laptop # BEGIN laptop alias home="cd /home/bob" # END laptop # BEGIN desktop #alias home="cd /home/robert" # END desktop
Using qualia with Git filters
qualia can be used with Git filters to automatically uncomment and comment the right blocks on different computers.
Git filters: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes
Here's an example setup:
$ cd ~ $ git init $ git add .bashrc $ cat <<EOF >.gitattributes * filter=qualia .* filter=qualia EOF $ git add .gitattributes $ git commit -m 'Initial commit'
On each of your machines, clone your dotfiles repository and run:
$ git config filter.qualia.clean qualia $ git config filter.qualia.smudge "qualia [qualities]"
Now, whenever you check out, commit, pull and push your dotfiles around, your machine specific configuration will always be correctly commented and uncommented on each machine.
Note that because Git applies its filters when files are checked out or committed, you may need to force Git to apply the filters when you first set this up:
$ rm .git/index $ git checkout HEAD -- "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"
Specification
mir.qualia uses semantic versioning. The
block qualification behavior is specified by the tests in
tests/test_Qualifier.py
. Major version compatible changes will
not change these tests.