I like to be able to diff the dotfiles in my home directory. Sometimes, just copying from one machine to another clobbers useful/necessary machine defaults (eg. $PATH).
I don't want to add my entire home directory to version control because slow, so I wrote a shell script to copy existing files out of the way and then symlink from e.g. ~/.bashrc to ~/-dotfiles/etc/bash. That way, I can 'cdd[otfiles]' (cd $__DOTFILES) and 'git status etc/.bashrc' and 'git diff'. It's a shell script in order to avoid having a dependency on python on eg mobile/embedded systems, but it does the job. I'm sure there are various other approaches to managing dotfiles within version control. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/bootstrap_dotfiles.sh#L278 Is being able to diff shell configuration a security advantage? You'd need to be pretty sophisticated to be making changes on disk; such as dropping a script or a binary with execute permissions into a directory at the top of the $PATH. On Friday, June 1, 2018, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 1 June 2018 at 02:11, Wes Turner <wes.tur...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Thursday, May 31, 2018, Matthias Klose <d...@debian.org> wrote: >> >>> On 26.05.2018 14:59, Nick Coghlan wrote: >>> >>> > Yep, after all the other entries. I actually think Debian/Ubuntu may >>> have >>> > changed their default set up as well somewhere along the line, but >>> even if >>> > they did, it potentially wouldn't change the settings for existing user >>> > profiles (depending on exactly how they implemented it). >>> >>> It's on the path by default in Debian and Ubuntu, only for new users >>> (~/.profile). >> >> >> I believe ~/.profile is copied from /etc/skel/.profile on most systems. >> > > Right, but distro upgrades are now regularly reliable enough that folks > may go for years without creating a fresh user profile for themselves. For > me personally, even when I do set up a fresh machine with a clean Fedora > install, I'll rsync my old home directory over the top of the new one. > > This kind of thing means that even when distros change their default > settings, a *lot* of users will still have the old default. > > Cheers, > Nick. > > -- > Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia >
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