Incipient Speciation

Like most Unix geeks, I've got a lovingly-crafted collection of dotfiles that I've come to depend on. But as a sysadmin, I play around on a larger collection of machines than most geeks probably get to (a fact for which I'm profoundly grateful) and, as a result, a larger set of home directories. I've come to love dfm, a git-and-perl bit of duct tape that makes managing and centralizing these dotfiles much, much easier...but it still depends on manually merging files back into the master repo, rebasing, etc etc which let's face it you don't always have time for.

It occurs to me that this is a lot like speciation -- in particular, allopatric or parapatric speciation, driven by (respectively) complete or partial geographical isolation. At some point (and I've hit this a few times now), everything diverges so much that there's just no way to get them back together without supernatural levels of effort and swearing. They drift apart, and some eventually die off. I wonder if you could use the ability to create a patch as a proxy for genetic drift. There must be a study somewhere on this...