Why I use git and puppet to manage my dotfiles

Re:Why I use git and puppet to manage my dotfiles by shazow on Monday May 16, 2011 @04:39PM (#2554076)

Seems that the de facto approach is to backup-rm-symlink. My approach is to source from existing configs whenever possible. Specifically, instead of

  mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak; ln -s $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc ~/.bashrc

I do a slightly more sophisticated version of:

  echo "source $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc" >> ~/.bashrc

(The sophistication comes in checking if that line already exists.)

Here's my install script: https://github.com/shazow/dotfiles/blob/master/install.sh

I've found many benefits in this, such as easily having machine-specific configuration side by side with my unified dotfiles and no backup clutter. This works especially well for things like vim configs, too.

  $ cat ~/.vimrc
  source $DOTFILES_PATH/.vimrc

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Re:Why I use git and puppet to manage my dotfiles by blackman on Monday May 16, 2011 @10:13PM (#2555022)

interesting, as an alternative to this how about how janus does it with a .local file?

https://github.com/carlhuda/janus/blob/master/vimrc#L147

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