I've been experimenting with dotbot [1] for the last little bit and it is similar to what is described here. The main difference being that the placement of the dot files is configured in a JSON/YAML file instead of a directly structure.
It doesn't have any external dependencies, unless you consider python an external dependency, but most all distros come with that built-in these days.
It's not a management system either. It's just a tool for describing where to copy things to. So if you simply choose not to use it later it's not that difficult to migrate.