In particular I was looking forward to writing a tool to convert a txtar file (https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/exp/cmd/txtar) to an apkovl, and basically tracking my whole system as just "base OS" + files from txtar.

The appeal of that was that the system configuration was just... files.

I'd like a way to reproduce that.

My Alpine diskless NAS broke again (same issue as https://www.reddit.com/r/AlpineLinux/comments/1c5diwb/issues_with_multiple_diskless_installs_recently/ although initially it wasn't even mounting /media/usb anymore). I really liked the apkovl model, but looking back at my maintenance log it just broke too often.

I would like to replace it with something where I can track most of the modified state in git. What are my options?

Not NixOS (I would like that but I am not learning the DSL), not Ansible, not Gokrazy (sadly, because no ZFS).