Subverting your homedir, or keeping your life in svn

Joey Hess put his entire $HOME directory into CVS in 1999. This is a practice in which he still engages, although he's since moved on to using Subversion as a multi-system, multi-purpose archival strategy.

I've considered this on a bunch of different occasions: I kept a .cdv in /var/www/conf for my httpd.conf file. I've since spread out to keep a couple of config files in /etc safe and sound.

For some reason, I haven't bothered putting /etc/pf.conf in there yet.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to dump all my data into any revision control system I don't completely trust, and I don't completely trust any RCS just yet. Sure, I'm gaga for Bram Cohen's Codeville, but it ate my repositories somewhere between Panther and Tiger. It takes a lot of work to get over an incident like that, and I really don't want to put my faith in theory-rich code that's seemingly frozen at version 0.1.13 while Bram and Ross Cohen go tilt at other windmills.

Sure, I could switch to Subversion. Or CVS, Arch, monotone, git, RCS, or Perforce. But I'm just not initimate enough with all of these to pick one that I really, really trust.