prompt functions should not only be init functions

[henrebotha]

Here's my use case.

1. I have chezmoi set up on multiple machines, and my life is good.
2. One day, I decide: I don't want my Git email address exposed in my public dotfiles repo. Instead, on each machine using chezmoi, I should get a prompt from chezmoi asking which email address I'd like to use in my Git config.
3. On one of my machines, I edit dot_gitconfig. I remove the hard-coded email address, and replace it with a template roughly resembling {{- $git_email := promptString "Git email" -}}{{- .git_email -}}.
4. I push this change to GitHub. When I next pull those changes to another machine, chezmoi apply et al prompt me for the email I'd like to use.

But alas, this doesn't work. All the prompt functions are init functions, which means they only exist for chezmoi init.

I don't understand this design decision. A comment from the author in an old discussion says this was done so that the user isn't constantly asked to answer prompts just for commands like chezmoi status.

But it appears that the password manager integration does exactly that; in my experiments with the Bitwarden CLI, chezmoi was constantly fetching values from Bitwarden for just about every little operation. Why the inconsistency?

And beyond that: How am I supposed to solve the workflow problem laid out above? Do I just completely lose access to the prompt functions once I have set chezmoi up on a given machine? What if I want to safely "re-init" a given machine without having to temporarily screw up my dotfiles; is there no way to trigger a re-prompt?

[bradenhilton]

But it appears that the password manager integration does exactly that; in my experiments with the Bitwarden CLI, chezmoi was constantly fetching values from Bitwarden for just about every little operation. Why the inconsistency?

The frequent prompting is unique to Bitwarden (and perhaps a few other managers), as some allow for temporary sessions which reduces the frequency of prompting. It's not a given that secret manager = prompting every time.

And beyond that: How am I supposed to solve the workflow problem laid out above? Do I just completely lose access to the prompt functions once I have set chezmoi up on a given machine? What if I want to safely "re-init" a given machine without having to temporarily screw up my dotfiles; is there no way to trigger a re-prompt?

Does chezmoi update --init (and/or chezmoi init --apply) not do this (assuming you put the prompts in your config template)?

[henrebotha]

The frequent prompting is unique to Bitwarden (and perhaps a few other managers), as some allow for temporary sessions which reduces the frequency of prompting. It's not a given that secret manager = prompting every time.

It doesn't necessarily prompt every time, but it hits Bitwarden every time (which I only know because bw is so absurdly slow that it adds obvious delay to every relevant command).

Does chezmoi update --init (and/or chezmoi init --apply) not do this (assuming you put the prompts in your config template)?

Both appear to be no-ops when I haven't yet pushed the prompt changes to GitHub. Which means I can't iterate on this locally, which is what I'm after.