document updated 12 years ago, on Mar 12, 2012
To get around problems of backwards-compatibility, and possibly machine-specific tailoring, you can use some form of a template to modify dotfiles upon git-clone:
use of templates for backwards-compatiibility
use of templates for machine-specific tailoring
use of templates for user-specific tailoring
(when there's a centralized version of the dotfiles that many different people use)