I recently moved my dotfiles to a private location. This goes against my previous belief in sharing the knowledge and allowing other to read and learn from my configuration.
Below is why:
Looking at my dotfiles I saw aliases, PATH statements, vim configuration, tmux settings, completions, etc. All information that gives someone a blueprint of exactly how I develop and where files could be placed to be loaded into my shell or various applications.
You can argue some of these setting could be infered from the repos and contribution in my profile, however my dotfiles are the blueprint, showing exactly where things could be placed to execute code.
My dotfiles have become a bit of a mess. I looked at them and realized it was not setup for an outsider to find valuable, re-usable code. Anything that was potentially useful would not be decipherable without time invested to extract the code, clean it up and write documentation.
I am very cautiouse not to commit credentials, however it is certainly feasible they could leak into my dotfiles. The more likely scenario is less innoculous data, project· names, versions, paths, etc slipping into my public profile over time.
I have re-written my dotfiles, stored them in a private folder and switched over to using pathogen for managing my vim configuration. I'm in the process of looking for generically useful code to pull out and open source correctly.
For those of you with public dotfiles, I'd browse through them and evaluate if you are comforatable with the data being shared about your development environment.