Excluding files in etckeeper with .gitignore doesen't work

Question

I use etckeeper for changes in my configfiles (on debian squeeze)

Since I also have an ircdeamon running, there are some files, that change every minute in the folder

/etc/hybserv/

I don't want to version control them anymore, so i added

hybserv/*

to the end of

/etc/.gitignore

but they are not ignored! They keep showing up every hour in the hourly commit.

what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to delete (=unregister) them from git.

Use something like

cd /etc
git rm --cached hybserv/*
git commit -m "Remove hybserv/* files from git"

Note the --cached option. With it, the files are only removed from git and are not deleted from the disk.