Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Like Alex, one of my physical machines is a laptop that is not always on the home network. Though I'm usually connected to *something*. I'm still debating whether to bother with a VPN or trying something like a tailnet.
Heck, before I adopted Debian and ran my own Linux-from-Scratch-started-before-LFS-or-Debian-existed "distribution", I used to run $HOME over NFS over WiFi. Sharing configs that way would be acceptable for me. I also used to keep my configs in CVS and pushed them using rsync-over-ssh-as-root, hence "current best practices". :-> Linux-Fan's MDVL stuff looks interesting. Everything can always be solved by one more layer of redirection. :-> I just have to suss out the Java and Ant stuff to understand the basics. Personally, I'm a big fan of NIH-Syndrome (otherwise I wouldn't have run a LFS type system for ~15 years). So it is likely I would reinvent what is happening there. One thing Linux-Fan mentioned was `config-package-dev`. In my OP, I commented about ``slightly old to really old tools'', and that was one I was thinking of. It looks like it hasn't been touched in seven years, and I wasn't sure if it still worked. But that drive by comments lends some hope. Using it would help address Alex's concern about modifying existing config files. That debhelper extension is designed precisely for that situation. But, its age is pretty much what inspired me to start this thread. Interestingly enough, I sent the OP just before I went to a BayLISA talk about Apple's PKL. Since I tend to only use whatever comes out of the Debian repos (my only exceptions being Firefox and an emacs package the maintainers won't fix for bookworm), I'm unlikely to do more than look at it, But, between it and MDVL, I think I'm definitely going to try to make sure I don't configure myself into a corner. :-> Thanks for all of the commentary so far. Once I get something working, I will *try* to remember to follow up here with what I've managed to cobble together. Cheers! mrc PS: Actually, I used to share $HOME (and /usr) over PLIP, so, it is probably obvious that FS speed is not always a concern for me.
