Re: tracking perms/ownership

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 24, 2007, 07:50 UTC
Message-ID: <86mywhfk17.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708232327100.25853@woody.linux-foundation.org>

[copied to gmane after sending personal copy by accident, since mails
 of me don't arrive on the list from my work account.  Sorry for the
 duplication.]

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

[make install]

Show 8 quoted lines

> See? Those ownership things are restorable *as*root*, but that
> doesn't mean that everybody should do development as root. In fact,
> I'd argue that any system that is set up so that you have to develop
> and merge things while being root is pretty damn broken.
>
> Which means that any such environment *has* to encode the owndership
> *separately* from the actual filesystem ownership. Because doing it
> in the filesystem simply isn't sane.

But in this case you have a work directory and an installation directory. And you have an installation procedure. No tracking is involved at all.

> So yes, you could have an insane piece of crap that actually tracks
> file ownership in the filesystem, and requires people to be root.

In your example, neither installed files nor ownership are tracked in the filesystem. Both are "tracked" in the Makefile. Or rather than being tracked, they are explicitly catered for by the user.

> Or you could use a ".gitattributes" file or similar _external_
> tracking method that allows even people who cannot actually set
> ownership to work with it.

git is a content _tracker_. It tracks contents, also contents that move around. If it can't track the permissions moving around as well, it's sort of pointless to integrate this into git: if you have to manage the stuff yourself, anyway, there is no point in creating the illusion that it is done by git.

> Your choice. But I know which one I'd choose.

That's fine. But you don't actually need git at all to implement your choice, so this is orthogonal to whether having an option to do it inside of git might be worth having.

-- 
David Kastrup