Question

I have 3 Linux machines, and want some way to keep the dotfiles in their home directories in sync. Some files, like .vimrc, are the same across all 3 machines, and some are unique to each machine.

I’ve used SVN before, but all the buzz about DVCSs makes me think I should try one – is there a particular one that would work best with this? Or should I stick with SVN?

Answer 1

I’ve had the same problem, and built a tool on top of Subversion that adds permission, ownership and secontext tracking, keeps the .svn directories out of the actually versioned trees, and adds a concept of layers so you can for example track all your config related to development, which you then only check out on machines you use for developing.

This has helped me organize my settings much better across the 50+ machines I log into.

Here’s the project page. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but we also use it at work to version system configuration for our 60+ servers.

In general, any version control system that uses some sort of metadata files to track stuff is going to cause you pain as is when actually using it.