©️ Copyright 1989-2020 Greg A. Woods, and other contributors.
See the file copyright for details.
Various people* suggest starting a "dotfiles" repository in a wide variety of ways, some quite convoluted.
The simplest though is to simply make your $HOME a Git working
repository (one containing only your (public) dotfiles).
Thanks to Drew
DeVault for giving me
the one tiny clue I needed to making this safe and simple to use. The
trick is to create a one-line $HOME/.gitignore file (and be sure to
add and commit it to your Git repository:
*
This means you will have to explicitly add files you want to track
(i.e. with git add -f .dotfile), but it also means Git won't be
constantly nagging you about files you don't want to track, and most
critically it will make it (relatively?) safe to use Git for other
repositories in any sub-directory of your $HOME.
I've created my dotfiles repo from my original $HOME/SCCS repository
using my modified version of
git-sccsimport:
git-sccsimport --move-date=2010/11/5T00:00:00 --move-offset=3 --expand-kw --maildomain=robohack.ca --git-dir="$HOME/work/home" --dirs SCCS
(Note: On 2010/11/04 I arrived in Kelowna from Toronto, so since that
time the local SCCS timestamps are three hours less than they were, so
if an SCCS timestamp is from before that date, then I tell
git-sccsimport to add three hours to it. Combined with use of
--expand-kw it is then possible to see the exact correspondence
between the new Git dates and the dates in all the SCCS headers using
"git log --date=local -p --full-diff".)
Then I published my dotfiles!
cd ~/work/home
hub create robohack/dotfiles
To use Git to record changes to my dotfiles I just moved (or copied) the
.git directory into place:
mv ~/work/home/.git ~/
Note: Until I test this more I won't likely be using Git directly on my main home server to record changes -- I'll continue using SCCS and incrementally update dotfiles from them.
You can now "clone" to a new machine (or share with others) with this set of commands:
cd
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:USERNAME/dotfiles.git
git fetch
git checkout -f master
When you use the default name name for your GIT_DIR of "~/.git", as
I've show above, it can be very dangerous if your ~/.gitignore
file ever ends up missing or with anything but a lone * in it! In
such a case an inadvertent "git clean" in a non-Git-controlled
sub-directory of $HOME would wipe your world (well but what's
tracked in ~/.git)!!! Indeed any other "git" command in a
non-Git-controlled sub-directory of $HOME could cause you headaches.
Another detailed description of this kind of setup is found at: [https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles]
#ident "@(#)HOME:README.md 37.1 21/03/23 11:43:08 (woods)"