This really is super-simple, and I like that. However, it doesn't handle configuration files that don't go directly in your home directory, such as $HOME/.ssh/config. I wrote something a few weeks ago which does that while remaining conceptually very simple. You can get it at https://github.com/sciurus/dotfile_management

Why not just have a git repo working copy in your $HOME directory? That way you can avoid any symlinking mess. The actual dotfiles are the ones from the working copy.

I used to do symlinking but found the working copy in $HOME approach much better.

Fails to delete symlinks to removed dotfiles. Doesn't support splitting dotfiles amoung multiple repositories.

I feel that the right solution to this is going to be vcsh.https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh No symlinks to dotfiles, all the files live in $HOME, but vcsh can be used to switch between accessing different git repositories that contain different of the dotfiles. http://vcs-home.branchable.com/ has more.

(Also, rake? yadr? vcsh is a posix shell script.)

I want to be able to manage other config files that aren't in my home directory at all. Some of them are even owned by root: httpd-vhosts.conf, /etc/hosts, php.ini... any good solution for that? I'm willing for it to be complex if it works.

I can't see the whole line of the code.