Unable to add .config files - chezmoi: git: fork/exec /usr/bin/git: argument list too long about chezmoi HOT 5 CLOSED

think this may be my issue. as it seems what I am doing is not dotfile management but a backup of my files that so happen to be under .folders, and git is not suited for that?

Exactly. git is a version control system, not a backup system. chezmoi is a dotfiles manager, not a backup system.

from chezmoi.

I'm sorry I got them confused. I do want to do versioning of my backups but git (and dotfilemanger) aren't the tool for this. https://rdiff-backup.net seems to be a good tool for this. Thanks, though, for responding. Also, thanks for chezmoi. While it doesn't help with the backup of my .files, I will still be using it for syncing select configs between machines, and the templates seem very helpful.

from chezmoi.

There are a couple of issues here, and only one of them appears to be related to chezmoi — but I don’t think that there’s a good fix for them.

• argument list too long is literally what happens when you call git add … with too many arguments or an argument list too long (1 million characters on macOS, but it may be shorter with fork). This could happen if full pathnames are used by chezmoi when calling git add; I don’t use auto-add, so I can’t say for certain whether this is the case.

• The git pack/disconnect is a git issue, unrelated to chezmoi. I have what I think is a fairly large chezmoi repo, and the pack is approximately 15Mb. (git count-objects -vH or du -sh .git).

  The report of a 2.7Gb pack suggests that you have committed large binary data (.zip files, etc.) which is a bad idea for git in general. This is something that you will need to resolve yourself, possibly following the suggestions in the linked SO post or other suggestions to shrink the size of a repository.

from chezmoi.

It sounds like you have way too many files in git.

What's the output of

chezmoi git status

?

from chezmoi.

It sounds like you have way too many files in git.

What's the output of

chezmoi git status

?

like I said in the op, I am trying to backup my WHOLE .config folder (well, with some exceptions that I added to .local/share/chezmoi/.chezmoiignore to ignore nonessential stuff like cache and logs). I think this may be my issue. as it seems what I am doing is not dotfile management but a backup of my files that so happen to be under .folders, and git is not suited for that?

chezmoi git status
On branch main
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 2 commits.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

nothing to commit, working tree clean

from chezmoi.