I decided to install etckeeper. It went ahead with an initialization after install on my debian machine, which somewhat surprised me, but not a big deal.
Looks like its a fairly standard git repository, but the README says that it has special support to handle changes caused by upgrades and installations - which I think includes hooks for pre and post installations. Sounds to me like it automatically tracks changes. Cool!
How does this effect NODOWS? I'm not quite sure yet, but I think the first step will be to move the NODOWS codebase to git.
