In reply to your earlier comment, it's a configuration management precisely because it has root - not irrelevant! That's a distraction though - gizzlon is righ

In reply to your earlier comment, it's a configuration management precisely because it has root - not irrelevant! That's a distraction though - gizzlon is right that it is extremely bad practice to recommend people keep unprotected keys to root accounts on a personal computer. Using passphrases and ssh-agent is a good and widely accepted solution to this problem (along with gizzlon's advice of having someone peer-review the code, again very standard and obvious).