The management system was taken from the elegant solution that Nicola Paolucci published with modifications to my taste.
bash <(wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mpeterson/dotfiles/master/bootstrap-dotfiles.sh)
bash <(curl -Lks https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mpeterson/dotfiles/master/bootstrap-dotfiles.sh)
This will install all dotfiles to your home directory, making backups as appropriate in .dotfiles-backup.
From here forward there is the alias dotfiles which is a very special git alias, as explained on the Atlassian site. The idea is basically to use dotfiles as if using git.