Introduce clean tasks

[x70b1]

aconfmgr is a great project. I work on a lot of things with it.

Sometimes I not only check the state of files and packages. I also execute some tasks. For example, clearing caches or deleting unused docker images. Why do I do this? Because I get my system back to a defined state when I run aconfmgr. aconfmgr removes everything that should not be on the system.

I can insert task commands in the source files of my configuration. This works so far. However, the output of this then appears in Sourcing ... It doesn't really fit there.

My idea now would be a function that fills an array with a command and a text.
Something like:

ExecTask "Delete unused docker images" "docker image prune -af"

The commands could then be executed with aconfmgr later. Maybe different tasks. PreTask for tasks between sourcing the config files and checking the system state. AfterTask runs at the end.

[CyberShadow]

Well... good to know that you have this working in some way, but aconfmgr's principles don't really align with that. Its goal is that, given an existing system and a configuration which describes the desired state of the system, it reconciles the two by either modifying the system or the configuration. So, to rephrase this in these concepts, the description of the desired system state could sound something like "the system does not contain any orphan Docker images", which could toggle a filesystem ignore rule in the configuration; aconfmgr would then reconcile the difference by deleting these files, or if using rm is not appropriate here, recognize that they belong to Docker and should be cleaned up using docker invocations (in the same way that it treats files owned by packages in a special way).

Refactoring the treatment of packages and their files into something more abstract, so that it's possible to describe subsystems which own files, is something I was thinking of as a potential goal in the future, but actually getting it to work seems improbable because there are a lot of requirements towards these subsystems (i.e. they need to be able to enumerate exactly the files that should be on the filesystem, check that they contain the expected contents, and be able to tell aconfmgr how to remove them or otherwise bring them towards the desired state).

Probably a more practical solution would be to use aconfmgr apply as one of the steps of a maintenance script, which could then contain other steps such as docker system prune.

[x70b1]

You are right. My approach is a shortcut for things that need to be defined more exactly.

I could also define various directories as empty. aconfmgr would then mark them as unexpected and clean up everything in the dirs. However these are usually too many files for which this would regularly be the case.

The idea of subsystems/modules is probably cool and the goal would be probably a 100% declarative system. On the other hand you open a huge box. As you start to define everything. Users in /etc/passwd, systemd services, Kernel options, mounts and disk encryption. This would be crazy.

I was mainly interested in your opinion. Thank you very much! I will then set it up differently and will probably run a cleanup script first and then aconfmgr can do his work.