Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

The problem with keeping all dotfiles in a single repo is that if you want to get an older version of one particular dotfile, you'll also be getting older versions of other dotfiles as well.

I want every dotfile I use to be independent of the rest and a log that shows changes to just that one dotfile, so I store each of them in separate repos and use GNU Stow[1] to manage them.

The above is actually a bit of an oversimplification of what I do, as I store related dotfiles in a single repo as well, so that (for example) all my weechat dotfiles are in a single repo, as I rarely want to checkout a single file independantly of the rest there.

[1] = https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

> you want to get an older version of one particular dotfile, you'll also be getting older versions of other dotfiles as well.

That doesn't really follow; it is easy to check out old versions of a single file with git:

    git checkout <revision> <filename>

for ".bashrc from two commits ago on the current branch", that would be:

    git checkout HEAD~2 .bashrc

Hopefully I'm not just misunderstanding your point here.

Or you could learn how git already does those things

Git can fetch a single file as of any commit with 'git show' and show the history of any single file with 'git log' or 'git diff'. Any decent web/GUI tool will do these things too.

A Git repo per small text file seems like overkill to me.

This sounds like a somewhat uncommon use case to me, but wouldn't a simple git per-file checkout work here?

Something like:

  git checkout c3f2ab -- configs/.vimrc

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