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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

but many/most dotfiles reside at the top-level of your home directory, where it wouldn't be a good idea to initialize a VCS repository

I totally disagree. I love having much of my home directory in git. I have a .gitiignore for the stuff I don't want in there, but the rest. Ahhhhh, so nice to be able to clone somewhere else and use.

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I take a similar approach. I have a dotfiles git repo in ~/dotfiles/ and have a Makefile which creates symlinks in my home directory. For example, ~/.bashrc is a symlink to ~/dotfiles/bashrc. That way, I can have a whitelist (whatever's in the Makefile) instead of a blacklist (like a .gitignore).

The fake bare approach might be easier: http://mjollnir.org/blog/migrating-my-homedirectory-from-one...

My main problem with this is it leads to accidentally executing git commands on your dotfiles repo.

Like, say you thought ~/src/xulrunner was a git repo, but it was actually managed with hg or maybe was extracted from a tarball. Whereas normally executing some git command would complain that this is not a repo, if your ~ is a git repo then git will happily execute whatever you told it to on your dotfiles repo.

For git repositories that are not touched very often, you can move the .git directory to something that isn't picket up automatically. Use it like this:

    mv .git dot_git
    git --git-dir="dot_git" add ...

Thats also a nice trick if you need a git repos in a git repos, e.g. for integration test for libraries interacting with git.

Be careful, this is how devs expose private ssh keys.

I push it to a local git repo that has the same perms as my account and .ssh directory. But, I agree. You need to be careful.

I also keep my whole homedir in git, and it's great. My approach isn't to .gitignore, because I want to ignore almost everything -- I just add and commit things when I want to track them. One of my many git aliases[1] is 'git sn' for showing status without untracked files; this helps when dealing with my homedir:

  status --short --branch --untracked=no

[1] https://github.com/cespare/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitconfig#L...

I actually prefer to .gitignore things explicitly, because then any new dotfiles show up in "git status" until I explicitly disposition them.

I have my homedir in git too and also ignore just about everything. I ended up using gitignore as a whitelist instead of a blacklist, e.g.:

    /*
    !/.gitignore
    !/.gitmodules
    !/.gitconfig
    !/.zshrc
    !/.zshenv
    !/.zsh
    !/.tmux.conf
    !/.vimrc
    !/.vim

I have a close setup. It just needs a little trick to add subdirectories :

  /*
  !/.emacs
  !/.emacs.d/
  /.emacs.d/*
  !/.emacs.d/themes/
  !/.emacs.d/functions/

You can check my .gitignore here [0].

[0] https://raw.github.com/dgellow/home/master/.gitignore

I wondered about this, but I pose this question to you: what happens if you have a merge problem with, say, a libreoffice doc or something. How do you handle that? I use hg, but I imagine my plight would be similar. TIA.

I don't keep anything but text files in my dotfile repo, so I haven't had to deal with this.

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