Re: Using GIT to store /etc (Or: How to make GIT store all file permission bits)
- From
- Kyle Moffett <mrmacman_g4@mac.com>
- Date
- Dec 10, 2006, 18:35 UTC
- Message-ID
- <19476830-E30A-42B7-AD9B-4C417D830C8E@mac.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <200612101926.33307.jnareb@gmail.com>
On Dec 10, 2006, at 13:26:32, Jakub Narebski wrote:
Show 8 quoted lines
> The idea is to not store /etc in git directly, but use import/ > export scripts, which for example saves permissions and ownership > in some file also tracked by git on import, and restores correct > permissions on export. That is what I remember from this > discussion. This of course means that you would have to write your > own porcelain... > > What about mentioned in other email IsiSetup?
The real problem I have with that is you literally have to duplicate all sorts of functionality. I want to run "foo-status" in /etc and get something useful, but if /etc is not a git directory in and of itself then you have to duplicate most of "git-status" anyways. And the same applies to all the other commands. From what I can see of IsiSetup the tools for checking out, merging, modifying, cloning, etc are all much more limited and immature than the ones available through GIT/cogito, and I would be loathe to discard all that extra functionality and duplicate a few thousand lines of code in the name of "concept purity".
GIT already has _some_ idea about file permissions, it just discards most of the data before writing to disk. Of course, adding POSIX ACLs and user-extended-attributes requires a new data format, but those are very similar to filesystem permissions; they differ only in amount of data stored, not in purpose.
Import/export scripts literally require wrapping every single GIT command with a script that changes directory a few times, reads from a different checked-out tree, and permutes some extended-attribute data slightly before storing it in the underlying GIT tree. Even without adding any new functionality whatsoever that doubles the amount of code just for finding your repository and checking command- line arguments, and that's a crazy trade-off to make in any situation.
Cheers, Kyle Moffett