I am not an expert in the internals of Jenkins so please forgive me for being vague in places here.

The disk usage plugin seems to cause XML files for my job configurations to be fiddled with on a fairly frequent basis.

I regularly see changes to those files that either add or remove a line like this:

    <hudson.plugins.disk__usage.DiskUsageProperty plugin="disk-usage@0.23"/>

I don't know when it does this or how it is useful. All I can see is that a large number of the changes to the job configuration XML files are related to this disk usage plugin. For example, the job config history plugin shows these changes even though they seem to be spurious.

I also have implemented a custom backup tool that, as a job on the master, copies the job configurations to a Bitbucket repository. I have had to make this job open every XML file and strip these lines out (using lxml.etree in Python) to reduce the number of spurious changes to the repository.

Please could somebody comment on what these lines are used for and how the disk usage plugin might be modified to not make these spurious changes.