TL;DR

I added a new function in dibs expansion for variables.

Again. My maximum overkill system for building Docker images got some time from me.

This time… it just made sense.

At the very beginning, I had the problem to pass proper paths to the programs run inside the container, which led to a system for expanding those paths as part of massaging the argument list before running the programs themselves.

Then came variables. A pretty rough system for handling variables, but sufficient for my needs. And with variables… came some functions to dynamically compute them. As an example:

variables:
  - &foo 'this is foo'
  - &bar 'this is bar'
  - &baz [join, '|', *foo, 'whatever', *bar]

does what you think, i.e. generate a value this is foo|whatever|this is bar that is associated to YAML anchor baz.

So you see it, right? It just made sense to have a new path function and allow me define all paths in the variables section, so that I don’t have to pepper the arg lists with the expansions:

variables:
  - &prereqs_dir  [path, src,   prereqs]     # .../src/prereqs
  - &cache_target [path, cache, my, target]  # .../cache/my/target

In hindsight, I have to say this about dibs:

• I still like using it
• It’s terribly undertested
• It’s also inadequately documented, especially for hacking on it, BUT
• It’s still easy to tweak it, even after so much time I don’t work actively on it.

All in all… I’ll continue using it 😄