Advice managing home directories

[Andrew Robinson <awrobinson-ml@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm looking for advice on managing my home directories on my home 
network. I have various flavors of mostly Fedora on various computers 
and sometimes on various partitions on the same computer. I'm trying to 
figure out the most convenient way to combine what's common between them 
with what's unique to each installation.

It would be trivial if I could put all the common stuff in a single 
directory, like a "My Documents" in Windoze. I could NFS-mount from my 
main server and link that directory into each home directory.

However, a number of applications seem to want put their configuration 
and data in dot directories directly in the home directory. jpilot and 
thunderbird are two examples. At this point I am identifying these 
applications and creating links. The more applications and the more 
installations, the more tedious and error-prone this approach becomes. 
Is there a better way?

Thanks!

Andrew Robinson