How to reuse/extend etckeeper's metadata engine for git control of non-/etc filesystems, or extend git natively with said capability?

Solution 1:

According to this serverfault answer, you just do this:

It is right there in the man page.

• Create a directory /foo
• Initialize with etckeeper: etckeeper -d /foo init
• Commit apply commits to the directory: etckeeper -d /foo commit 'message'

Solution 2:

I digged in this problem and I decided to create a project git-store-meta for it.

git-store-meta is a perl script which integrates the nice features of git-cache-meta, metastore, setgitperms, and mtimestore. It should serve a good compromise of the flexibility, functionality, performance, and cross-platform portability and consistency.