[JoshTriplett]

I highly recommend not symlinking things at all; just have the repository itself as your home directory.

Whenever I set up a new machine, I always do this:

    git clone git://joshtriplett.org/git/home
    mv home/.git .
    rm -rf home
    git checkout -f

(There probably exists a simpler way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.)

I can always check out my repository via git:// even on a machine where I want to push to it, because my repository includes a ~/.gitconfig containing:

    [url "ssh://joshtriplett.org/"]
            pushInsteadOf = "git://joshtriplett.org/"

So, I can automatically push as long as I have SSH access to my server. (I wrote the support for pushInsteadOf in upstream git, specifically to enable this use case.)

[epe]

I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do:

    git init .
    git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git
    git checkout -t origin master