vcsh - Version Control System for $HOME - multiple Git repositories in $HOME
While it may appear that there's an overwhelming amount of documentation and
while the explanation of the concepts behind vcsh needs to touch a few gory
details of git internals, getting started with vcsh is extremely simple.
Let's say you want to version control your vim configuration:
vcsh init vim
vcsh vim add ~/.vimrc ~/.vim
vcsh vim commit -m 'Initial commit of my Vim configuration'
# optionally push your files to a remote
vcsh vim remote add origin <remote>
vcsh vim push -u origin master
# from now on you can push additional commits like this
vcsh vim push
If all that looks a lot like standard git, that's no coincidence; it's
a design feature.
vcsh allows you to maintain several Git repositories in one single
directory. They all maintain their working trees without clobbering each other
or interfering otherwise. By default, all Git repositories maintained via
vcsh store the actual files in $HOME but you can override this setting if
you want to.
All this means that you can have one repository per application or application
family, i.e. zsh, vim, ssh, etc. This, in turn, allows you to clone
custom sets of configurations onto different machines or even for different
users; picking and mixing which configurations you want to use where.
For example, you may not need to have your mplayer configuration on a server
or available to root and you may want to maintain different configuration for
ssh on your personal and your work machines.
A lot of modern UNIX-based systems offer packages for vcsh. In case yours
does not, read INSTALL.md for install instructions or
PACKAGING.md to create a package yourself. If you do end
up packaging vcsh please let us know so we can give you your own packaging
branch in the upstream repository.
Some people found it useful to look at slides and videos explaining how vcsh
works instead of working through the docs.
All slides, videos, and further information can be found
on the author's talk page.
There are several ways to get in touch with the author and a small but committed community around the general idea of version controlling your (digital) life.
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IRC: #vcs-home on irc.oftc.net
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Mailing list: http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home
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Pull requests or issues on https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh