Re: Sharing home and etc files with git

From: Kelvie Wong <kelvie@ieee.org>
Date: Jun 5, 2008, 22:48 UTC
Message-ID: <94ccbe710806051548x485aefe8j2ad6b40b74d68747@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <48484607.5090505@gmail.com>

On 6/5/08, iiijjjiii <iiijjjiii@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I would like to use git to keep revision histories of my home and etc
> directories. I have several computers and I like to keep their environments
> similar. I could see git pulls updating .bash_aliases, .bashrc, and various
> bash and perl scripts I create in the home directory, and updating /etc
> config files. Git pushes would share any recent changes to other computers.
> This way no matter which computer I am working on, the environment will be
> similar and I can make changes and know they will be copied to the others.
>

Completely understandable; also remember that pushing, unlike pulling, does not update the working tree (and you wouldn't want it to).

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>  I haven't figured out a good way to deal with the files that have local
> settings in them. Using .gitignore feels a little overkill. Only certain
> lines of the files need to be unique. Once they are set, I'd like subsequent
> changes to be updated. I could cherry-pick manually but I'd like a more
> automated method. I have read about etckeeper, git-home-history and gibak,
> but they seem to be designed for backing up and versioning files on one
> computer and not for sharing files.
>
>  Has anyone done something similar using git or is another tool more
> suitable.
>

I'm fairly certain there are tools out there for this, but what I do is I have all of the files that I want to add (such as ~/.${SHELL}rc, ~/.${SHELL}.d/*, and .emacs) into ~/.git-home; then I symlink all of these files/directories into my $HOME (with a short script that's also checked in).

I then throw this entire repo somewhere where all my other machines can pull/push from, and I resolve merges as needed. It works fairly well.

-- 
Kelvie Wong