This tool implements my symlinking scheme for system wide machine specific configuration files. In effect, it centralizes system config files (typically found in /etc) into the ~/system directory with a simple scheme for managing per-machine configuration. See the README in ~/system for more details on the scheme.

The typical way in which this utility is run is to first confirm that the changes look okay:

$ setup-system-links --dry-run

and then commit them:

$ sudo -E setup-system-links

Backups are made of each system config file before they are replaced, and the output of the commands above show where the backup resides.

The main downside of this approach to configuration is that it makes these config files user editable where as they are normally only configured via root. But these days, most of my systems are single-user with NOPASSWD access to sudo, so this isn’t really a main difference maker in my setup. Therefore, this scheme won’t work well in more robust shared systems.