Re: tracking perms/ownership

"Josh England" <jjengla@sandia.gov> writes:

I can see that storing textual names in gitattributes and having the root user run git so that it can chown(), would work.

But this is only about checkout. After you chown a file in the work tree and run update-index, next write-tree would not record it, as there is no place in tree objects to record uid/gid. You would need to arrange so that a matching change is made in the gitattributes file if you go that route.

If you had:

	etc/*		owner=root
        etc/frotz	owner=nobody

in gitattributes, and you did a checkout. You chown etc/nitfol with "chown printer etc/nitfol". Somebody needs to add a line

	etc/nitfol	owner=printer

to gitattributes before you make the commit. Maybe the chown was not about etc/nitfol but about making etc/frotz owned by root. Then you would, instead of adding the etc/nitfol line, remove existing etc/frotz line so that earlier glob would capture and express the idea of making everything owned by root. I suspect this would get rather tricky quickly.

Of course, you would need to worry about resolving merge conflicts of gitattributes file, too.