[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2016-09-27T13:31:57Z"
 content="""
Are there any config files in /etc whose mtime influences the program they
configure in some way? That would be a very good reason to include the
mtime.

If the goal is to keep track of multiple manual changes to /etc, the best
thing to do is to manually run etckeeper commit after making the change.
Relying on the daily autocommit is at best a fallback.

Need to consider the resource impact of adding mtimes to /etc/.etckeeper 
would not be very bad. The files are already statted, so no extra overhead
there. 

How about the size increase of /etc/.etckeeper?
For each file in /etc, a line like `maybe touch -d '1970-01-01 00:00Z' foo` would
be needed. (That seems the most compact available way to specifiy a time to
touch.) On my system, that adds 136kb to /etc/.etckeeper, a little bit more
than doubling its size.

That doesn't seem too bad a resource impact. 
"""]]