issue with template interpretation in .chezmoidata

[jbwfu]

This is the process I followed to reproduce the issue:

$ pwd
/home/cherry/.local/share/chezmoi
$ cat .chezmoiroot
home
$ echo "os: {{ .chezmoi.os | quote }}" > home/.chezmoidata/test.yaml
$ chezmoi execute-template '{{ .os }}'
chezmoi: /home/cherry/.local/share/chezmoi/home/.chezmoidata/test.yaml: yaml: invalid map key: map[string]interface {}{".chezmoi.os | quote":interface {}(nil)}

According to the documentation here, it states: "If a directory called .chezmoidata exists in the source state, then all files in it are interpreted as template data in the format given by their extension."

This situation has left me confused about why the dynamic template interpretation did not succeed in my .chezmoidata directory. Is this a bug, or is there something incorrect in my understanding or syntax?

[halostatue]

.chezmoidata is treated as template data, it is not templatable itself. It must be static.

[jbwfu]

Can it be understood that .chezmoidata itself provides data for templates to use, but it does not support templates itself and must contain fixed content? I have tried adding the .tmpl suffix, but this resulted in it not being recognized as a known format (e.g., YAML).

[halostatue]

The only templating that can happen for chezmoi data is in chezmoi.$FORMAT.tmpl and that happens with chezmoi init. Data in .chezmoidata/*.$FORMAT cannot be templates, because there would be a race condition/deadlock in providing data.

You can obtain dynamic data, but not through templates in .chezmoidata/*. All of my templates in home/.chezmoitemplates except lazygit_config.yml.tmpl are dynamic data, and you can see in home/private_dot_config/git/identities/run_onchange_git_identities.sh.tmpl and home/private_dot_config/git/config.tmpl show that dynamic data pulling down more dynamic data from 1Password and parsing it for execution.

[bradenhilton]

Can it be understood that .chezmoidata itself provides data for templates to use, but it does not support templates itself and must contain fixed content?

@jbwfu That is correct.

I think the wording in the docs is perhaps a little confusing. Other template-adjacent pages use phrases such as "interpreted as [a] template", much like the .chezmoidata docs, but the important part there is "interpreted as template data".

@twpayne Could this be reworded to something like "Provides structured static data for use in templates"?

[twpayne]

@twpayne Could this be reworded to something like "Provides structured static data for use in templates"?

Yup! Please open a PR for this :)