Subversion homedir

UPDATE: My $HOME for my dotfiles is now https://github.com/kaihendry/dotfiles

Inspired by Joey Hess in the past couple of years I have had my homedir in a subversion repositry. I tipped about this a while back, but I thought I should give the topic some blog treatment.

When I move to a new machine in $HOME:

hendry@perry:~$  ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/hendry/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
6c:2e:4e:8a:f2:54:b3:1a:89:25:59:65:f9:fe:1a:2f hendry@perry
hendry@perry:~$  ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_dsa.pub hendry.iki.fi
15
Password:
Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh 'hendry.iki.fi'", and check in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

hendry@perry:~$ svn co svn+ssh://hendry@hendry.iki.fi/home/hendry/repo/public/home .
svn: Failed to add file ’.bashrc’: object of the same name already exists

Unfortunately, this generally means I have to manually remove .bashrc, .bash_profile et al out the way and re-run the checkout a couple of times.

If I wish to read and write emails from that machine, I generally need my addressbook and mutt colouring from another private repository:


svn co svn+ssh://hendry@hendry.iki.fi/home/hendry/repo/private/Mail

I don’t keep my Maildir (mail archives) in the repo because I filter mails through Gmail and use offlineimap/mairix dumps from my IMAP server on whatever machine I read mail from. So there tends to be copies or backups of my Mail.

Browse my public repository to learn more.

It isn’t perfect.

I had some awful problems keeping .mozilla in there, in order to maintain my bookmarks. Now I am keeping them with delicious. Pinboard!

I don’t keep binary files like porn or mp3s in there. I back them up occasionally with rsync like so:


rsync -essh -rtpv ~/pictures backupmachine:

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