[pielud]

I take a similar approach. I have a dotfiles git repo in ~/dotfiles/ and have a Makefile which creates symlinks in my home directory. For example, ~/.bashrc is a symlink to ~/dotfiles/bashrc. That way, I can have a whitelist (whatever's in the Makefile) instead of a blacklist (like a .gitignore).

[zeckalpha]

The fake bare approach might be easier: http://mjollnir.org/blog/migrating-my-homedirectory-from-one...