Related: See using GNU Stow for the same result

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331485

http://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/

Nice, never heard of that, thanks

Wouldn't something like Dropbox (or some kind of hacky rsync/shellscript/cron replacement) be more appropriate for that? Usually you don't want to version your configuration files; you just want them to be the same in all places. And with a repository I still have to think about committing, pushing and pulling.

My dotfiles have acquired enough cruft and interdependence in the many years they've been written that I certainly benefit from keeping them under version control. If all you have is a dozen lines in .bashrc and .tmuxrc it's ok, but once you pile up custom scripts and configs it gets out of hand quickly and you actually end up with regressions.

I'm the author of the article. I think that the fact of having a repository actually is more appropriate, because (at least for me) dotfiles are really not a static set of files. At least say, once a week, I end up changing something, something that I'm not 100% sure I'll adopt in my workflow. So I create a branch for that change that I can safely delete later if needs be.

I've been meaning to look in to ThoughtBot's RCM [1] dotfile management system for something like this, btw.

[1]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm