Re: Track /etc directory using Git

From: Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org>
Date: Sep 15, 2007, 14:29 UTC
Message-ID: <20070915142932.GB27494@artemis.corp>
In-Reply-To: <20070914212643.GA10970@amy.inscure.wireless.home.vilz.de>

On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 09:26:43PM +0000, Nicolas Vilz wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 01:31:06PM -0400, Thomas Harning Jr. wrote:
> > On 9/14/07, martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net> wrote:
> > > also sprach Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> [2007.09.14.1008 +0200]:
> > > > Did you find an alternative to git in this case ?
> > >
> > > 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.
> > 
> > It looks like it could work.... any thoughts on this?
> 
> I use that tool. If you just have one branch, it works. With the
> commit-hook, which also updates the metadata, you have current
> permission tracking. 
> 
> There is a lack of a checkout-hook, which sets the permissions, so you
> have to remeber todo a metastore -a after you checked out a revision.

  Note that having metastore run by a hook makes it unsuitable for /etc
versioning, because you may have short period of times during which
s3kr3t files are readable by more people that what it should be.

  The sole sane way to do that would be to track permissions, acls,
whatever _in_ git. Though, I'm still not convinced that it is such a
good idea at all. I mean for source code you absolutely _don't_ want git
to track permissions (outside from the +x bit). You don't want git to
try to chown your files to "madcoder:madcoder" because I was the last
one committing. So that would mean that you want sometimes to track
permissions, sometimes not. So you need a bunch of tools to list files
whose permissions have to be tracked, and whose permissions don't need
to be.

  I fear that you'll end up with quite a big bloat of git, for a use
case that is fairly limited.

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org