Digital housekeeping again: packaging and AI

I have thirty years' worth of accumulated automation material in the form of scripts on my main Linux boxes. Every now and then I do some gardening / housekeeping to try to cut back the growth and organise the material.

Some of my scripts are packaged up. But lots still languish jumbled together in ~/bin.

Indeed I found a script in ~/bin which was literally for evicting executables from ~/bin and sticking them in their own package directory, with an installer and revision control.

Meta

And then it all got a bit meta.

• I used the packager script to evict itself into a new package.
• Then I used it to evict a tool which asks ChatGPT's API a question based on a two-part prompt derived from two separate files (e.g., a prompt that's about the second file)
• And I used *that* to make a tool for autogenerating UNIX man pages for tools
• And then used it to generate its own man page

(etc)

GNU Stow

My package installer uses GNU Stow to do the actual installation; this lets me stick stuff in /usr/local on my own laptop and in ~/.local on shared machines. The installer created by the evict-to-package script looks like this:

set -eu

PKG=$(basename $(realpath $(dirname $0)))

PREFIX=${PREFIX:-/usr/local}
STOW=$PREFIX/stow
DIR=$STOW/$PKG

if [ -d $DIR ]; then
    find $DIR -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec rm -rf - {} \;
fi

BASE=$(dirname $0)

if [ -d $BASE/bin ]; then
    install -d $DIR/bin
    install -m 755 -t $DIR/bin bin/*
fi

if [ -d $BASE/man ]; then
    # note we're assuming there's only section 1
    MANDIR=share/man/man1
    install -d $DIR/$MANDIR
    install -m 644 -t $DIR/$MANDIR man/*
fi

if [ -d $BASE/share ]; then
    # note we're assuming it's all non-executable
    install -d $DIR/share
    install -m 644 -t $DIR/share share/*
fi

cd $STOW
stow -t $PREFIX $PKG