Some functionality of --autotemplate seems broken?

[danpf]

Basic problem

from the docs it seems like doing chezmoi add --autotemplate should add .tmpl to the chezmoi file, but it doesn't seem to be doing that (--template is not implied?)

it also seems like based on the issue below that --autotemplate should escape {{{ or {{ if it exists in the file, but it doesn't?

https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/manage-machine-to-machine-differences/
^ this says chezmoi add --autotemplate should create dot_gitconfig.tmpl but i don't see that here with this test case

#723
^ this issue seems to say that autotemplate should add escapes for any present brackets, but that doesnt' seem to happen in my testcase

chezmoi version v2.17.1, commit 565cbbe117746aa6bfec5f2cee20ae4cbbb5e645, built at 2022-05-30T10:24:34Z, built by goreleaser

Background

I want to add some templating to my .zshrc file but it has a bunch of {{{ foldmarker blocks which causes chezmoi to die with the following error:
chezmoi: template: dot_zshrc.tmpl:3: unexpected "{" in command

Maybe I'm doing this wrong, or maybe it's not supported and I'm interpreting the docs incorrectly. either is fine I just wanted to check.

tests

testcase:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_simp*
echo "\"vim: set foldmethod=marker foldmarker={{,}}
{{ .machine_env }}
" > .simplefile
chezmoi add .simplefile --autotemplate --template
echo "printing chezmoi data*"
chezmoi execute-template '{{ .machine_env }}'
echo ""
echo "printing dot_simp*"
ls ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_simp*
cat ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_simp*


# THE ABOVE GIVES THIS:
printing chezmoi data*
y
printing dot_simp*
/home/me/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_simplefile.tmpl
"vim: set foldmethod=marker foldmarker={{,}}
{{ .machine_env }}


# REMOVING --template GIVES:
printing chezmoi data*
y
printing dot_simp*
/home/me/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_simplefile
"vim: set foldmethod=marker foldmarker={{,}}
{{ .machine_env }}

chezmoi config file:

[data]
    machine_env = "y"

[twpayne]

Thanks for reporting this. To be honest --autotemplate is pretty sketchy as the fundamental problem of "reversing" the output and template variables to get the input template has no clearly-defined friendly solution. For example, if you have a template variable (e.g. machine_env) is the single character y then --autotemplate should replace every y character in the entire file with {{ .machine_env }}, which is probably not what you want.

With regards to --autotemplate implying --template, --autotemplate only makes the added file a template if an actual variable substitution was found. This is for when you use chezmoi add --autotemplate somedir/, in which case it's desirable that only the files in somedir/ that need to be templates end up as templates, rather than every single file in somedir/ being a template. This is the case you're hitting in the reproduction case you give: no variable substitution is found, so the .tmpl suffix is not added.

The case of --autotemplate not automatically escaping {{ and }} is definitely a deficiency. I'll fix that.

[danpf]

Oh I see, I was missinterpreting some parts of --autotemplate documentation. What I was thinking was clearly wrong.

I added some more documentation in a pr to clear that up (at least for me) https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/pull/2148/files

If that's not the place for it, or if you don't like the changes you can just close it, nbd.

Thanks for responding so fast, I just started switching over to this and I think this project is great!