My haphazard collection of dotfiles.
http://sdt.github.com/.dotfiles/
The dotfiles themselves all lives in a .dotfiles subdirectory, to avoid my
whole home directory tree being a git repo.
There's three basic strategies to get various programs to use a dotfile outside
the usual place. In order of preference, they are:
1. ~/.programrc includes ~/.dotfiles/programrc
This of course requires the dotfile have some kind of include mechanism.
2. Environment variable: PROGRAM_CONFIG=~/.dotfiles/programrc
3. Shell alias: alias program='program --config-file=~/.dotfiles/programrc'
The included install.sh takes care of setting up the first form. It tries to be
idempotent, but should not be fully trusted.
The other forms are set up in bashrc.