Instead of upgrading "in place" my operating system for each new major version, I prefer wiping it clean and having a fresh start. I've found that this also encourages a good backup hygiene.

However, I'm used to certain tools and consider them necessary to be productive in my work. Reinstalling them at the same time as the OS is tedious because many cannot be immediately installed via the OS' package manager. At first I automated the process of installing these tools with a shell script. The many usual weaknesses of shell scripting (I don't want to maintain 300+ lines of shell to ensure proper error reporting, idempotence, and absence of quoting bugs) later drove me to Ansible for this task.

• duplicity.yaml restores everything I need from my Duplicity backups (mostly config files, git repos and documents — no software of course).
• fedora.yaml installs all the software I need, or updates it if it is already installed.

With ansible-pull:

ansible-pull -KU https://github.com/thilp/workstation-setup.git fedora.yml

TODO:

• Configure Gnome:
  • wallpaper
  • keymap