on gentoo for example I have accrued a few files under /etc/portage that to my knowledge just have to live there…
right now I basically rely on my backups for this. but maybe somebody knows a clever way to handle this?
Maybe etckeeper fits your use case? It’s specifically built for managing /etc files with version control systems. I can’t say much about it since I’ve never used it, though.
I personally symlink/hardlink to my dotfiles repo. You can see an example of it here.
There should be no dotfiles outside of home directories so I assume you mean a config file. In those cases, git and symlinks are a great option. Make a config directory in your home dir and organize it however you want. Include config files for the tools you’re interested in, commit them to git for backups and then symlink/hardlink the file to the expected path for the application.
NixOS does that well. I never quite managed to figure out a solution to this on other distros (which is actually what led me into making the jump in the end).
@gkpy I assume by “dotfiles” you simply mean “config files” as there should be nothing in your /etc/portage directory that’s hidden. For all configs I want to backup, I just keep a copy of them elsewhere. As for portage stuff, I just copy my make.conf, and everything in each repos.conf and package.* directories.
If you want to simplify a complex solution to an already simple thing, take a look at bare git worktrees.
The other portage-relevant file you might want to back up is /var/lib/portage/world, which isn’t even in /etc.
@nyan Yes, always backup world if nothing else. How the hell’d I forget that!. I usually symlink it to /etc but then forget I did when updating backups. Worst case, I wind up with a slightly old world file if I need no rebuild.
