Strategy for managing files in /etc, suggestions?

[Chris Green]

I use mercurial for managing all the little bash and python utilities
that I write for my various Linux systems and it's very handy.

I'm thinking that it would be an excellent idea to keep track of
changes I do to system configuration files in /etc, I try to keep
these to a minimum but some are inevitable.

What's the best way of handling this, changes to very few files in a
directory with (probably) thousands of files?  Is it best simply to
copy them out to a development area, do changes there and copy them
back to /etc?  I'm not entirely happy with this method but I can't
really see a better way.  I suppose one could set up a mercurial
repository in /etc and have a .hgignore that ignores everything then
'add' files that I'm changing.

Does anyone else do anything like either of the above?  ... or is my
OCD getting the better of me! :-)

-- 
Chris Green