I agree that its overkill for the use case mentioned in the article, a Makefile would be more than sufficient. I do the same for my vim configuration using `make`: https://github.com/aonic/vim-settings/blob/master/Makefile

Usage:

  git clone https://github.com/aonic/vim-settings.git
  cd vim-settings
  make

Remove:

  make clean

Nice method, but with a bash script you wouldn't have to manually add any new files to your Makefile. I use this one: https://gist.github.com/975295. Also handles forcibly linking a file if it exists already (with the -f flag).

Of course, you're just using it for one folder so it's not an issue for you ;)

Yeah I can see how this could be overkill. I initially started by writing my own script but I made that script more complicated than necessary (trying to handle removing files and such). So the end result was that I didn't trust the script with my files.

Perhaps there's room for a simple puppet-style configuration manager that lives in just a single script, in some ways similar to sqllite.

Agreed, I use a relatively simple shell script to link all of my files in a "home" directory in dropbox to my real home directory on multiple machines:

    #named link.sh, greps out some common things we don't want to link, also have vim stuff in a different dotfiles repo
    cd $(dirname $0)

    for F in $(ls -a1 | grep -v link.sh | egrep -v "^..?$" | grep -v .DS_Store | egrep -v ".hg(ignore)?$" | egrep -v "^vim$"); do
        if [ -a $HOME/$F ]; then
    		echo "**** Found existing $F, skipping..."
        elif [ -h $HOME/$F ]; then
	        echo "Already symlinked $F, skipping..."
    	else
    	    echo "Linking $F"
    	    ln -s $PWD/$F $HOME/$F 
    	fi
    done

This would be a little hard for me because I like to keep my system configuration files in the same repository (such as fstab and php), although I could setup some standard naming scheme like root.etc.fstab to link to /etc/fstab

If you were going to categorize like that why not just use an etc/ and home/ folder inside your repo?