OK, I’ve fallen in love with putting my home directory in Subversion. The benefits are enormous. They include (but are not limited to):

• ease of setting up environment on new system
• backup
• ability to go “back in time” using Subversion tags

Mind you I don’t put everything in there, just the important stuff like my shell configuration files and my vim configuration files. Other important files (like pictures and music I spent ages ripping) are backed up in other ways.

Here’s what I currently have saved in svn:

$ svn ls http://my.svn.server/svn/home-dir/trunk/
.Xdefaults
.antrc
.bash_profile
.bashrc
.dircolors
.inputrc
.irbrc
bin/
vim_local/

So now when I’m on a system, I’ll have the same look and feel and same functionality as the utilities I use will be available in my ~/bin directory.

For those astute readers, you’ll notice that I don’t have a .vimrc file in there. That’s because I’m using an excellent tip from Amir Salihefendic
about taming your vim config. Basically on each system I have a specialized but simple .vimrc that sources the vim_local for what it needs.

I’ve found this setup works great on the many different systems I use throughout a given week (e.g. Windows, Mac and Linux). And I’m safe in the knowledge that my configuration files won’t disappear should my machines suddenly implode.