I manage a chef cookbook for deploying minecraft servers. Minecraft currently edits servers.properties, banned-ips.txt, banned-players.txt on each startup. This causes problems for people using configuration management tools to deploy their minecraft server.

The way these tools work generally is if you have changes to your templates, in this case the configuration files named above, the server will restart. If you do not have any changes the server has no reason to restart.

Since minecraft rewrites the files managed (possibly others as well) each startup, my cookbook readjusts the files each time to match the templates I have defined, so every run requires a restart to the server.

Is there a reason why minecraft has to edit these configuration files each startup, adding timestamps and adjusting the order of the settings?