Let a machine say what it is for, and give Firefox its face back

Phase 4: the optional application categories, and the Firefox chrome.

Everything Panama installed until now was what every machine gets, which meant a
work laptop acquired emulators and a desktop that wanted Steam had to be told
about it by hand. The interview now offers the categories in
setup/packages/extras/ as a checklist -- gaming, creative, communication,
virtualization -- and nothing is preselected, because a default here installs
applications nobody chose on a machine whose owner answered a question they
thought was about something else.

A category is one file, and a category mixes both package managers because the
applications do: Steam is in RPM Fusion, Slack publishes only a flatpak. So a
bare line is a dnf package and a flatpak: line is a Flathub ID, and one file
holds the whole answer rather than splitting each category across two. The menu
is read from the directory rather than written down, so adding a category is
adding a file. Every name in all four was resolved against the actual
repositories before being written down, and the contract re-resolves them --
the point of admitting applications one at a time is that they stay installable,
and a typo here fails on somebody else's machine, not this one.

Firefox is declared, and its chrome is Edge-Frfox, vendored into config/firefox.
sunhat carried that theme with no license and no attribution; it is MIT, and now
it says so and says whose it is.

It is the only piece of Panama's configuration that does not go to a path this
repository chooses. Firefox owns the profile directory, names it with a random
salt, and does not create one until the browser has been run -- so link-dotfiles
finds or creates a profile and links both halves into it. Both, or neither works:
chrome/ is the CSS and user.js sets the preference that makes Firefox read chrome/
at all, without which the theme is a directory of dead files.

Two assumptions there were wrong, and the contract exists for both. Firefox has
moved to the XDG directories -- the profile root is ~/.config/mozilla/firefox on
this build, not ~/.mozilla/firefox, and writing to the wrong one themes nothing
and says nothing about it. And -CreateProfile turns out to be non-interactive, so
a fresh machine gets the theme on the first install rather than the second. The
contract runs link-dotfiles for real against a throwaway home with no profile in
it and looks at what came out; it was checked by pointing the search at the
legacy path only and watching it fail.

Also: the enrolment/enrollment spellings from the last commit are corrected. This
repository is US-spelled everywhere else -- color 1131 times against colour never
-- and consistency in prose is worth as much as it is in code.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-20 21:24:15 -04:00
parent b319d1a5e1
commit 88497826ec
168 changed files with 6293 additions and 32 deletions
+14 -3
View File
@@ -14,17 +14,28 @@ in order, without stopping again:
| Script | Does |
|---|---|
| `interview` | Every prompt, before anything is installed. Answers last one run and are never written to a durable path |
| `install-packages` | Repos (RPM Fusion, Terra, Hyprland COPR), then the package lists in `setup/packages/` |
| `link-dotfiles` | Symlinks `config/dot/<name>``~/.config/<name>`, and seeds the wallpaper and cursor theme |
| `install-packages` | Repos (RPM Fusion, Terra, Hyprland COPR), the package lists in `setup/packages/`, then whichever optional categories were chosen |
| `link-dotfiles` | Symlinks `config/dot/<name>``~/.config/<name>`, and seeds the wallpaper, cursor theme and Firefox chrome |
| `change-settings` | Copies `config/copy/` over `/`, applies gsettings, enables user services |
| `link-vicinae-scripts` | Publishes the Vicinae script commands |
| `setup-identity` | git config, `gh auth login`, an SSH key — whichever were asked for |
| `install-hardware` | NVIDIA, Secure Boot enrolment, Fedora's extras, firmware — each only if it was asked for. Last, because enrolment and firmware are consumed at the next boot |
| `install-hardware` | NVIDIA, Secure Boot enrollment, Fedora's extras, firmware — each only if it was asked for. Last, because enrollment and firmware are consumed at the next boot |
The run ends with a health summary from `panama-doctor`, which reports what is
actually running rather than what was attempted. It never fails the install: on a
fresh machine it legitimately reports things as not yet configured.
### Optional applications
Every machine gets the lists in `setup/packages/`. The interview also offers the
categories in `setup/packages/extras/` as a checklist, so a work laptop need not
acquire emulators and a desktop need not skip Steam. Nothing is preselected.
A category is one file. A bare line is a dnf package and a `flatpak:` line is a
Flathub ID, because the applications in a category do not all come from one
place. Adding a category is adding a file — the menu is read from the directory,
not written down anywhere.
Existing configs are moved to `config/old/` rather than overwritten.
## Desktops