Remove the repos/ subdir, as it must be in its own Git repo.
Remove the master/ subdir, as it must be in its own Git repo.
New gitignore list for the log file, and for the subdirs which are Git repositories themselves.
Use a globally maintained list of authors, with room for more structured info, instead of extracting them all from the package descriptors.
Read the list of packages from a specific author from denormalized files.