Shared home directories between distros

[Collins Richey]

Here's a little conundrum to take our minds off red and blue states for a while.

I like to tinker with multiple distros, but sharing a home directory
can create problems with widely varying levels of kde, gnome etc. and
with varying conceps of a suitable uid (some start with 500, some
start with 1000, etc.).

What I would like to wind up with is an arrangement similar to classes
in an OO structure such that all hidden files go in a unique place and
other files go in a shared place in a home directory and have this
automatically resolved, ie

   *-------------*
   | .files         | --->
   | (distro 1)  |
   *-------------*                *-------------------------*
                                       |   shared common  |
           . . .       --->          |       directory          |
                                       |     for my userid      |
   *-------------*                *-------------------------*
   | .files         | --->
   | (distro n)  |
   *-------------*

There may be a few .files like .mozilla that I would choose to copy
between distros,but most of them I would want to keep segregated to
avoid niggling problems such as the desktop software falling over
because it's encountered out-of-version stuff in its private
playground.

I could probably make this work with some sort of symlinks, but then
there's the problem of differing uids. If each distro is left to its
own devices, the shared common directory might not be easily sharable
without tionkering with permissions.  I've never been able to find
just where a distro keeps its concept of "next available uid" so that
I could change all distros to have a common behavior for assigning
uids..

Any suggestions?

--
Collins Richey
      Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code ... If you write
      the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not
      smart enough to debug it.
             -Brian Kernighan