Re: empty directories

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

I'd not call it entirely pointless without ownership: under most systems, only root can do chown, so for example a private backup of a home directory usually has unique ownership (and nothing but the normal ownership could be restored by a user, anyway).

However, once the user is member of more than a single group and actually makes _use_ of that, we are getting on thin ice. But at least different group ownership is usually much better contained (and thus reconstructible manually in the case of an emergency) as the permissions are.

Since tracking permissions would be a per-project decision (nothing else makes any sense), it should be workable to amend the tree records themselves by adding ownership and ACL and whatever else optionally right there in-place if one figures out a good syntax for it.

One still needs to come up with a good and flexible way to implement policies: what kind of permissions/ownership data will be let into the repository from workdir/pushing, and what won't?