Anything written to ~/ does not persist. ~/.gitconfig, ~/.rake, etc..

[apolopena]

Describe the bug

When a workspace is stopped and restarted. ~/.rake is blasted away and so is anything written to ~/.gitconfig. In fact any files that are written in the init phase that are not in /workspace (or deeper) will not be there on subsequent startups of the workspace.
A seperate but related issue is that also the initialization log /var/log/workspace-init.log turns into a zero byte file on subsequent starts of a workspace because the docker image writes that file empty and expects the init task to populate it, which it does.... once..... /var/log/workspace-image.log is fine because the docker image writes to it. /var/log/xdebug.log is fine to be reset on every startup aswell unless we wanted to log to persist between startups of the workspace.

UPDATE: this bug has been addressed in Feature #31

td;LR Anything that is written to ~/ from anywhere will not persist.

Screenshots

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a new workspace
2. Stop the workspace
3. Start the workspace
4. run: git a and the output is:

git: 'a' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

The most similar commands are
        add
        am

5. run ls ~/.rake and the output is:

ls: cannot access '/home/gitpod/.rake': No such file or directory

Expected behavior for running git a

Output for (at a minimum) should be:

alias.aliases config --get-regexp '^alias\.'
alias.a config --get-regexp '^alias\.'
alias.cap !f() { git add .; git commit -m "$@"; git push; }; f
alias.new !f() { git cap "📦 NEW: $@"; }; f
alias.imp !f() { git cap "👌 IMPROVE: $@"; }; f
alias.fix !f() { git cap "🐛 FIX: $@"; }; f
alias.rlz !f() { git cap "🚀 RELEASE: $@"; }; f
alias.doc !f() { git cap "📖 DOC: $@"; }; f
alias.tst !f() { git cap "🤖 TEST: $@"; }; f
alias.brk !f() { git cap "‼️ BREAKING: $@"; }; f
alias.lg log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit

Expected behavior for running ls ~/.rake

Output (at a minimum) should be:
changelog.rake

Additional information

Currently and unfortunately Gitpod does not persist anything in ~/ (/home/gitpod).

The hack here could be to take out anything that parses, copies or write new files to ~/ and move that into a before task in .gitpod.yml (UPDATE: this worked for the git aliases and the rake tasks).

before tasks run before the init command but unlike the init command before tasks run everytime the workspace is started so take that into consideration.

A system for persisting files needs to be devised.

[apolopena]

Hack required
This bug applies to anything not written to /workspace. Currently Gitpod only persists /workspace
This means that if we want to preserve the init logs in /var/log, they will need to be copied to /workspace
furthermore there will file collisions wunless those files copied to /workspace are put in a folder specifc to that project but not the same name as that project. for example log files for the project test would need to go into /workspace/test-files