At first I thought this was a cute lead up to git-annex and then I realized it was a straight forward question and that you want incremental diffs. You should t

At first I thought this was a cute lead up to git-annex and then I realized it was a straight forward question and that you want incremental diffs. You should take a look at git-annex[1] one of joey's other projects if the diff feature is not a deal breaker. "git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space. git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser." The only joeyh project that I use more than git-annex or etckeeper is moreutils.[2] (Obviously I'm not including joey's enormous contributions to Debian) Included in moreutils: chronic: runs a command quietly unless it fails combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8 lckdo: execute a program with a lock held mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first parallel: run multiple jobs at once pee: tee standard input to pipes sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file ts: timestamp standard input vidir: edit a directory in your text editor vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command The only program that I never have a use for is ts, I use tai64n[3] from djb. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2] http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ [3] http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/tai64n.html http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/tai64n.html