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Your dotfiles and you
This is an introductory article describing what dotfiles are and why you should treat them as a life long software project.
- ygra 13y agoWouldn'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.
- weland 13y agoMy 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.
- grota1981 13y agoI'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.
- izmty 13y agoRelated: See using GNU Stow for the same result https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331485 http://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/ http://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/
- grota1981 13y agoNice, never heard of that, thanks
- holyjaw 13y agoI'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 https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm