Package: etckeeper
Version: 0.17
Severity: wishlist

My git log contains a bunch of spurious changes to
automatically-generated files.  The most commonly changed files in my
repo are:

    $ cd /etc && sudo git log --raw |
      grep ^: | cut -c 40- | sort |
      uniq -c | sort -nr -k 1 | head -20

    320 .metadata
    112 resolv.conf
     98 ntp.conf.dhcp
     98 default/ntpdate.dhcp
     69 .etckeeper
     63 mailcap
     49 apt/sources.list
     26 passwd-
     26 passwd
     24 emacs-snapshot/site-start.d/00debian-vars.elc
     22 shadow
     22 network/interfaces
     19 wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
     18 gshadow-
     18 group-
     18 group
     18 alternatives/c++
     17 gshadow
     14 shadow-
     14 sgml/catalog

Recording auto-generated files bloats my git log and makes it harder
to find deliberate changes.  I could probably fix this on a
per-machine basis with some sort of .gitignore, but if a file is going
to be auto-generated on *all* hosts, it seems to me that etckeeper
should ignore it by default (i.e. out of the box).

In particular the files ntp.conf.dhcp and default/ntpdate.dhcp are
auto-generated on any host that has them (the same is NOT true for
resolv.conf).  Other files that might be worth ignoring OOTB are:

- shadow files (those ending in a hyphen)
- compiled elisp byte-code (.elc)
- alternatives (since they are managed by /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives)
- sgml/catalog file -- whatever that is; and
- X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/* -- this appears to contain randomly
  named MIT cookie files.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages etckeeper depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]        1.5.22      Debian configuration management sy
ii  git-core                     1:1.5.6.2-1 fast, scalable, distributed revisi
ii  mercurial                    1.0.1-2     Scalable distributed version contr

etckeeper recommends no packages.

-- debconf information:
* etckeeper/unclean: true
  etckeeper/commit_failed:



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