Managing dotfiles with git

[read part II here - I have completed and open-sourced a solution]

Like anyone that's developed on *nix for many years, I have ended up with a very customized set of dotfiles. However, when I get a new machine or even make a change to a dotfile that I'd like on all of my machines, it can be a real PITA to keep things synchronized.

Since I'm trying to learn git, I thought this would present a great opportunity to learn git and solve the problem of managing dotfiles across multiple machines.

I found a couple of great blog posts about this topic that I thought I'd share:

http://psung.blogspot.com/2007/11/version-control-with-git-remote.html

and

http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/managing-dotfiles-with-git-continued.html

Which was good background info. However, it didn't seem so clean to me to have a git repo in my home directory just to manage the dotfiles. A little more searching and I also ran across a github repo that has a solution to make dotfile management cleaner, and I am using his Rakefile to allow me to easily clone and install my dotfile setup anywhere.

I did have a little trouble setting up a bare git repo to serve as my central repo for pushing/pulling, but this article helped me get that set up as well.

Enjoy!

Alan