From: Daniel Barkalow Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:51:49 GMT Subject: Re: Storing permissions Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <42620092.9040402@dwheeler.com> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, David A. Wheeler wrote: > 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 *This .sig left intentionally blank*