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I am looking for a tool that would "make all my (linux) systems look the same". What I mean by this, is that I use many programs that put some kind of global config file in my local home folder. Say ~/.vimrc for Vim. I am used to my settings and I get extremely annoyed when my configs differ (say on host A and B). For Vim, I have a git repository which takes care of it, but it would be cumbersome to create a repository for each program, and it would probably break if I had ALL configs in the same repository (for instance, the ~/.synergy.conf must be slightly different on different hosts, but very similar on most).

So, before I start designing and writing something like this, I was wondering if somebody knows a tool that is flexible enough to specify how a configuration file can be adapted automatically for different systems (my low-end approach would be some Makefiles and a git repository, but there must be something more sophisticated, right?).

From the top of my head, some examples could be: Vim (.vim/+.vimrc), Git (.gitconfig), Opera (.opera/???), List of installed packages, OpenSSH (.ssh/config) but the list goes on endlessly.

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By "list of installed packages" do you mean you want applictions that are installed to be installed to all devices automatically? – Paul Oct 19 '11 at 4:11
@Paul: Ideally it would somehow ask, or simply point out which are missing. I realise this needs superuser privileges, which I only have on some machines (but not all). Again, what I want is flexibility (for example, when setting up the synch tool for a host, I could tell it to either automatically install missing packages or to ignore them). – bitmask Oct 19 '11 at 4:31
Well the config parts are relatively easy using rsync. Are all the machines running the same distribution - which one? For the machines I have that are permanently on the same network, I just use a shared /home over nfs. – Paul Oct 19 '11 at 4:51
Your approach does not work for laptops (which may be without network/internet access), also sharing one /home is way too strict for my taste. Besides, I do not own all machines, and on some my user name is different and I have not root access. As I said, the data isn't exactly the same, but it is quite similar. I'm probably going to tailor something with Makefiles and a bunch of scripts, but I wanted to check that I'm not reinventing the wheel (I hate that). – bitmask Oct 19 '11 at 5:08
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