Re: Storing permissions

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Apr 17, 2005, 14:51 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0504171045150.30848-100000@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <42620092.9040402@dwheeler.com>

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, David A. Wheeler wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> There's a minor reason to write out ALL the perm bit data, but
> only care about a few bits coming back in: Some people use
> SCM systems as a generalized backup system, so you can back up
> your system to an arbitrary known state in the past
> (e.g., "Change my /etc files to the state I was at
> just before I installed that &*#@ program!").
> For more on this, see:
>   http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/06/svn_homedir.html
> 
> If you store all the bits, then you CAN restore things
> more exactly the way they were.  This is imperfect, since
> it doesn't cover more exotic permission
> values from SELinux, xattrs, whatever.  For some, that's enough.

I think this should be possible with a different tag than "tree". All the bits aren't sufficient, anyway; the unincluded values include the user and group, which are likely to matter for some things in /etc. But there's no reason that the core can't support both a system-local complete representation of the dentry and a user-relative representation of a source distribution with different tags.

For that matter, it could accept "dir" objects in commits as well, and use version-control-type logic on history while refusing to do non-sensical things with them.

	-Daniel
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