Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like too much software to me. What's with the aversion to scp? You only have to do it once per box you set up... There's something to be said for having GitHub do everything 1000% for you, but there's also something to the unix philosophy that would suggest git is good at the version control thing, and scp is good for the configuration-file-moving thing.
so... which version of the config file are you using?
Just because it isn't in a public repo on GitHub doesn't mean it isn't versioned properly. Quite the contrary, I use git locally and on a personal webserver for tons of stuff.
The point isn't that it shouldn't go into git. It's that it doesn't belong as part of your project. Different config options are often needed on each machine, especially development boxes. I don't have the same database.yml as my co-workers... I have my box in production mode or with memcache off for testing purposes maybe... There's tons of stuff like that.
I still keep those files (along with my ~/.git/config, ~/.ssh/config, .gemrc, ~/.profile, ~/.vim* and a hundred other things) in git, just not on GitHub in a public repo.