also sprach [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008.08.26.2255 +0100]: > Google and you can find lots of people who keep their dotfiles in > a git repository. Usually they create a directory such as > ~/dotfiles/ and they move all the dotfiles they want to track into > that directory, and create the git repository in that directory. > Then they have a script of some kind (I've seen scripts in half > a dozen languages for this) that creates symlinks from the root of > their homedir into their dotfiles directory, e.g. linking > ~/.muttrc/ to ~/dotfiles/muttrc/.
I found this too ugly and cumbersome and never liked the redundancy a script would introduce, or the mess of symlinks cluttering ~. Therefore I started to experiment with "detached worktrees" with Git. The concept is easy: ~/dotfiles/vim.git is what I call a fake-bare Git repository (meaning ~/dotfiles/vim.git/config holds the Git config, but core.bare is false), with core.worktree set to ../../. As a result, ~/.vimrc is actually a plain file versioned in the repository at ~/dotfiles/vim.git. This works reasonably well for me, but I have yet to figure out how to deal with .gitignore. Also, to commit or otherwise interact with the vim repository, I have to set $GIT_WORK_TREE and $GIT_REPO accordingly prior to any command using /usr/bin/git. At the moment, I am using a script called vcsh[0] for that, which spawns a subshell with these variables set (and the $PS1 modified to help me keep track), and I am actually liking it a lot, even though at first I tought this explicit "context-switching" would quickly get on my nerves. 0. http://git.madduck.net/v/etc/zsh.git?a=blob;f=.zsh/func/vcsh;hb=HEAD The approach has the advantage that my /bin/ls -l output is not polluted with a lot of symlinks, and that I can tell someone else to look at e.g. http://git.madduck.net/v/etc/zsh.git?a=tree and know immediately what goes where. No explanation, no script, no redundancy, little room for failure. Joey's mr script knows how to deal with "fake-bare" Git repositories, so "cd ~/dotfiles/vim.git && mr commit" will work as expected, as will "cd ~/dotfiles && mr update". As mentioned before, the problem is simply that in the context of ~/.git or ~/dotfiles/vim.git a file like ~/.mutt/muttrc is "unknown" and will show up in git-status output. One way to deal with that is to put stuff like /* !/.vimrc !/.vim into ~/dotfiles/vim.git/info/exclude, but unfortunately, that has to be done on every machine and cannot be synchronised. It would be possible to version ~/.gitignore.d/vim in ~/dotfiles/vim.git and set core.excludesfile in ~/dotfiles/vim.git/config, but that too is something that has to be done on all machine and won't be synchronised. There's also an issue with certain Git repositories requiring post-processing after cloning and merging (see http://git.madduck.net/v/etc/ssh.git?a=tree;f=.ssh;hb=HEAD for an example, which uses make to generate the configuration actually used by SSH). This can either be done with something like mr, but it's hackish, or with ~/dotfiles/ssh.git/hooks/update, but that isn't versioned or synchronised. Maybe someone has an idea how to deal with those issues? > I'm not entirely clear on why, in the examples I've seen, the -s > option is used to create symbolic links instead of just using hard > links. Many "editors" don't respect hardlinks and would unlink them, causing your files in ~ to become detached from the Git-versioned files. > What about the permissions of your dotfiles? Git does not track > file permissions, except for the executable bit, so people often > create scripts to somehow store and restore the permissions of all > the files. I have ~ at 711 and a umask of 077 and have been happy so far. -- martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/ "nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." -- oscar wilde spamtraps: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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