metastore (was: Track /etc directory using Git)

From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
Date: Sep 15, 2007, 13:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20070915132632.GA31610@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070914212643.GA10970@amy.inscure.wireless.home.vilz.de>

also sprach Thomas Harning Jr. <harningt@gmail.com> [2007.09.14.1931 +0200]:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > No, and I did not look anywhere, but I know of no other VCS that can
> > adequatly track permissions.
> Has anyone checked out metastore?  http://repo.or.cz/w/metastore.git
> ... there's an XML error in there somewhere, so its not loading the
> 'main' page, but http://repo.or.cz/w/metastore.git?a=shortlog should
> work.

This looks interesting, though I guess getfacl/setfacl and getfattr/setfattr can pretty much do the same job, especially if you can call them from shell scripts/hooks (except for mtime). Or did I misunderstand something?

The problem with metdata getting corrupted, which Nicolas reported, may well have to do with the use of a single file. It may be worth to consider using a shadow hierarchy of files, each containing the metadata, e.g. for a project with foo, and bar/foo and bar/baz files, you might have

  .metastore/foo
  .metastore/bar/.<uniqueid>.dir
  .metastore/bar/foo
  .metastore/bar/baz

and each file could just be an rfc822-style file:

  Owner: root
  Group: root
  Mode: 4754
  Mtime: 1234567890
  Fattr-<key1>: <value1>
  Fattr-<key2>: <value2>

This would be my approach, which should probably be a little better at preventing corruption.

Anyway, this *really* should go into git itself!

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martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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