.chezmoiexternal + chezmoi add == inconsistent state?

[ToxicFrog]

I have a ~/.zsh/ directory. It holds all my rc scripts for zsh, as well a git repo holding the ZGen package manager. I am trying to migrate this setup to chezmoi.

So, I create .chezmoiexternal.toml:

[".zsh/zgen"]
  type = "git-repo"
  url  = "https://github.com/tarjoilija/zgen.git"

and use it for a bit and everything is fine.

But then I edit my zsh configuration, and I don't want to manually add every file in .zsh that I edited, so I just chezmoi add ~/.zsh. And that succeeds, or at least appears to! But then I chezmoi status and:

$ chezmoi status    
chezmoi: .zsh/zgen: inconsistent state (.local/share/chezmoi/dot_zsh/zgen, https://github.com/tarjoilija/zgen.git defined in .local/share/chezmoi/.chezmoiexternal.toml)

Looking at my source dir reveals that chezmoi add has created a dot_zsh/zgen directory. Apparently chezmoi add was not able to realize that .zsh/zgen was managed by .chezmoiexternal and tried to add it normally, thus the inconsistency.

I can work around this by adding it to .chezmoiignore:

.zsh/zgen/**

but that produces a big ball of warning spam.

I've also tried using git submodules with the external_ prefix as documented here, which work a lot better overall, but have a different problem: even with the external_ prefix, the executable bit isn't preserved for any files in that submodule.

Ideally, I think, the behaviour I would like is:

• setting up cm on a new machine clones the git repos in .chezmoiexternal into the appropriate directory
• edits I make in those directories show up as diffs
• cm add copies those edits into the cm repo, and cm apply discards them

.chezmoiexternal seems to be the preferred approach for this, but I can't figure out how to get that behaviour. Submodules are a lot closer, apart from the executable bit getting dropped.

Anyone know how to do this?

[nandalopes]

The possible workaround is to delete dot_zsh/zgen from source state after running chezmoi add.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Maybe add dot_zsh/zgen to both .gitignore and .chezmoiignore to prevent it from being added?

Not sure as I've never tested it, but it seems that would keep you from chezmoi wanting to deal with that path.

[twpayne]

Thanks for reporting this!

Fundamentally, I think you've hit #1574 which will require a refactor of chezmoi's internals to fix. This is planned (but not promised) for chezmoi v3.

Submodules are a lot closer, apart from the executable bit getting dropped.

You created a fantastic bug report in #2964 and this should now be fixed with #2966 and released in v2.33.4