I was kind of surprised to see this article on HackerNews, so I thought I’d ask here; how do you handle your dotfiles and do you share them publicly?
My own dotfiles started from those provided by ArcoLinux, with a bunch of changes over the years I had them. Currently installed using Ansible, because that’s more sensible than Bash for this imo.
What do you mean? It’s just a few lines to symlink everything for me.
I don’t use symlinks, I copy the files to their place. This also means I have to manually copy updates back into my repo, but it massively reduces the risk of committing a private key or a bunch of bad changes to my repo.
My switch to Ansible from bash was mainly motivated to make the initial setup more robust. My setup script would need fixes every time I installed a new machine and be semi-unattended at best. I find it also easier to make changes and add new steps
For reference, here are the bash scripts I used before:
config script
setup script