I was interested in chezmoi, but they don't want you[1] managing files outside your home directory which made it a non-starter. I need to manage /etc/ and /usr/local/ too.
[1] https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/frequently-asked-questions...
[1] https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/frequently-asked-questions...
This is highly dependent on distro, but for any use-cases where editing /etc/ is the recommendation, I have found that either:
(a) It's a development environment thing (e.g. httpd vhosts) & thus I see it as quite separate to "my dotfiles" (a personal machine env thing): I try my best to manage dev env stuff from project-specific repos wherever I can (i.e. a bash script to dispatch required local /etc/ changes in a repo "./scripts" dir or similar), or otherwise if it's a more significant set of configs, Ansible.
(b) It's a specific app that is recommending doing things the "Wrong Way™". There's often a workaround to get it to use $HOME or $XDG.
(c) It's OS package configs. I've found that things like repo & key installs are well suited to chezmoi run_ scripts. For anything more advanced or esoteric, I guess that may be an exception.
For an example, see https://github.com/felipecrs/dotfiles:
The `home` directory contains home directory files.
The `root` directory contains root directory files (e.g `/etc`).
https://github.com/k4j8/filetailor
One thing I like about filetailor I didn't see in Chezmoi was the ability to surround code with a comment specifying which machines it should be commented/uncommented for. It's easier than templates in some situations.
It works great, but there's probably tons of bugs that occur when used by someone other than me. I don't have a CS background and this was my first big hobby project.