I like to be able to diff the dotfiles in my home directory. Sometimes, just copying from one machine to another clobbers useful/necessary machine defaults (eg. $PATH). I don't want to add my entire home directory to version control because slow, so I wrote a shell script to copy existing files out of the way and then symlink from e.g. ~/.bashrc to ~/-dotfiles/etc/bash. That way, I can 'cdd[otfiles]' (cd $__DOTFILES) and 'git status etc/.bashrc' and 'git diff'. It's a shell script in order to avoid having a dependency on python on eg mobile/embedded systems, but it does the job. I'm sure there are various other approaches to managing dotfiles within version control. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/bootstrap_dotfile... Is being able to diff shell configuration a security advantage? You'd need to be pretty sophisticated to be making changes on disk; such as dropping a script or a binary with execute permissions into a directory at the top of the $PATH. On Friday, June 1, 2018, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
On 1 June 2018 at 02:11, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, May 31, 2018, Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> wrote:
On 26.05.2018 14:59, Nick Coghlan wrote:
Yep, after all the other entries. I actually think Debian/Ubuntu may have changed their default set up as well somewhere along the line, but even if they did, it potentially wouldn't change the settings for existing user profiles (depending on exactly how they implemented it).
It's on the path by default in Debian and Ubuntu, only for new users (~/.profile).
I believe ~/.profile is copied from /etc/skel/.profile on most systems.
Right, but distro upgrades are now regularly reliable enough that folks may go for years without creating a fresh user profile for themselves. For me personally, even when I do set up a fresh machine with a clean Fedora install, I'll rsync my old home directory over the top of the new one.
This kind of thing means that even when distros change their default settings, a *lot* of users will still have the old default.
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia