Am I abusing git by making my home directory a repo and then having other repos within it? [closed]

Question

For years, I've set up my home directory as a git repo:

~ $ ls -a
.git/  .vim/  code/  .bash_history  .bashrc  .gitconfig  .gitignore  .vimrc

I'm careful not to commit files that contain sensitive information (e.g. my private ssh key). In fact, I ignore everything except a few files:

~ $ cat .gitignore
# ignore everything
*

# except these
!.bashrc
!.gitignore
!.vimrc

Normally, I have several projects in code/ with their own git repos:

~ $ ls -a code/
ctest/  cpptest/  dwm/

~ $ ls -a code/ctest/
.git/  pointers  pointers.c  strings  strings.c

It never occurred to me that this was strange until a coworker raised concerns about it. Am I somehow abusing git by setting up my home directory this way? Can it lead to problems with programs attempting to use my dot files?

Answer 1

It's definitely not crazy to put your dotfiles in git. I do it so that I can easily sync my configuration among multiple machines and I'm not alone.

That said, it is poor form to have a git repository in your home directory and then have other repos beneath it.

Some people solve this by checking out their dotfiles repo into a sub directory of $HOME and then symlinking those files into home. (There are some scripts to help manage this at https://dotfiles.github.io.

Personally, I don't like symlinking and instead create my dotfiles repo in a directory that is not .git (for example: .dotfiles.git). You can simply rename the .git folder to .dotfiles.git. Then you can:

git checkout --git-dir=.dotfiles.git checkout .profile