Re: git and symlinks as tracked content

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: May 4, 2005, 23:03 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0505041854040.30848-100000@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <4278EEC6.2090607@dwheeler.com>

On Wed, 4 May 2005, David A. Wheeler wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Once you're there, it wouldn't be hard to add logic to add options to
> (1) record the REAL permission bits, (2) record "." files, and
> (3) recover the permission bits.  That would be enough to
> store & recover in a distributed way a single person's home directory.
> THAT might be darn useful, for those of us who float between
> different systems & would like to use a single system for multiple purposes.
> That's clearly beyond the scope of a typical SCM, but since
> it's easy to get there, that'd make sense.

The status quo with respect to the permissions is actually the correct thing for an SCM, because you want to generate the corresponding tree for a different user (e.g., with the other user's umask applied, etc.), not the same tree.

This is a situation in which doing 90% of one thing, and then supporting 90% of something else separately is best. What you really want is to have a "directory" object type that stores the exact permissions, and the uid/gid, and even xattr stuff. Then you use those for distributing your home directory, but not for distributing source trees, where that stuff is useless and somewhat wrong. You could probably have the same kind of commit objects, although you still need some way of figuring out what kind of object is desired for the directories in a commit.

(on the other hand, it might make sense for git to handle files starting with '.', and only skip .git).

	-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*