Keeping your dotfiles in git

[Joey Hess]

chombee at lavabit.com wrote:
> Second, to create all the symlinks you only
> need a simple command not a script: `ln -s ~/dotfiles/* ~/`.

That won't deal with dotfiles that are renamed or deleted.
 
> I'm not entirely clear on why, in the examples I've seen, the -s option is
> used to create symbolic links instead of just using hard links.

I've had better luck with sylinks (various things can accidentially
break a hard link, in a non-obvious way), but do have to use hardlinks
for a few things. IIRC fetchmail refuses to use a symlink for example.

> Also, I fail to see the point in having a dotfiles directory. It might
> make it easy to break things up into generic dotfiles that apply to all
> machines that you use and go in the dotfiles directory, and dotfiles that
> are only used on particular machines and go in various
> dotfiles-machinename directories. But aside from that, why not just create
> the git repository directly in your homedir? Give it a .gitignore file
> that ignores everything (contains one line with just a *), then add to the
> repo only the files you want to version with commands like `git add -f
> ..muttrc`.

I have several dotfiles that I don't want to share to every machine with
a checkout of my home directory, so need multiple repositories.
 
-- 
see shy jo
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