I'd like to put all my dotfiles (like .profile, .gitconfig, etc.) in a central git repository, so I can more easily keep track of the changes. I did this, but I would like to know how to properly handle keeping them in sync with the actual ones in ~/. I thought that you could just hard link the two using ln, but this does not seem to work as I expected, i.e., if I edit one file, the other does not change. Maybe I misused the ln command, or else I misunderstand how hard links work.

How do people usually do this? Judging by GitHub, it's a pretty popular thing to do, so surely there's a seamless way to do it that someone has come up with.

By the way, I'm on Mac OS X 10.6.