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    Curious what lead to the belief that $HOME should be sharable without a second thought‽ Even encrypted RSA private keys shouldn't be shared. Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 19:16
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    if you are in fact talking about putting the contents of your home directory into git just note: it is difficult (but not impossible) to dig through git history and carefully remove sensitive items permanently (git is designed to help prevent losing things), and also remember that when you switch branches or checkout an earlier revision git will change the permissions of your files to 644 after checkout which is bad for things like private ssh keys. however etckeeper is a solution for using git with permissions for /etc/ Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 19:29
  • @derobert: I'm well aware of that. I wasn't talking about making $HOME public, just dotfiles and convenience scripts. Those are where I've been finding stuff that doesn't belong. And yes, I should be able to share my .zshrc, .vimrc and similar things without having to sanitize them first! Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 19:53
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    If you haven't seen it, see the vcs-home wiki and mailing lists, which is basically people discussing exactly this -- how to keep your $HOME under revision control. Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 20:02
  • I don't know how much you can change the behaviour of git, but at least the way it works out-of-the-debian-repository it is quite greedy when it comes to searching for tracked/untracked/modified files and it automatically feels responsible for every file. mrb already stated this. Sometimes I get annoyed by this greedy behaviour even in relatively small projects I wouldn't want that in my home directory. Why do want to use git? I'm also using a versioning system to sync my configuration files across hosts and I'm quite happy with CVS because it's so simple! Git is very (too!) powerfull for that Commented Aug 29, 2012 at 7:54