I tend to have a bunch of reference material stored in my home directory. Everything from RFCs, which is trivial to get at again using a quick rsync command (but immensely useful when I want to look up something and am not online) to requirements specifications for systems I made years and years ago.
If I didn’t use a VCS, I would just store those in a directory off my
home directory, to be perused whenever I felt the need. Now, with a VCS
controlling my ~, it feels like I should be able to get rid of those,
and just look them up again if I ever need them. However, this poses a
few problems, such as “how do you keep track of not only what is in a
VCS, but also what has ever been there”. Tools like grep doesn’t work
so well across time, even though git has a grep command too, it still
doesn’t cut it for non-ASCII data formats.
Does anybody have a good solution to this problem? I can’t think I’m the only one who have the need for good tools here.