Re: gitweb wishlist

From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: May 24, 2005, 21:14 UTC
Message-ID: <42939942.9080807@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0505241410380.2307@ppc970.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> 
> I don't like source repositories with dot-files, and I thought it was a
> good idea to disallow them, but on the other hand I'd like it even less if
> some CVS-weenie goes and says "I can't convert my project to git without
> potentially losing information".
> 
> So in the name of furthering humanity through allowing people to migrate
> away from CVS, I'm considering making the git dot-file check be more
> specific to "." ".." and ".git". After all, project-specific rules might
> have their own porcelain-related ignore-files that cause dot-files to
> never appear..
>

There is another good reason to allow dot files: since git handles sparse trees well, and only needs metadata at the top level, it's pretty ideal for keeping track of people's account profiles across accounts, and that's mostly dot files.

I was considering using CVS for that at one point, but the way CVS distributes its metadata and recurses makes that insane. For git, it would be trivial.

	-hpa