Re: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .gitmodules, .gitprecious?, .gitacls? etc.

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Aug 26, 2007, 15:05 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0708261656500.16728@wbgn129.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <52E107D8068148B795FB4279B6272B8E@ntdev.corp.microsoft.com>

Hi,

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Dmitry Kakurin wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
> >> 2. Storing metadata in regular source-controlled files feels wrong to 
> >> me.
> > You are free to _feel_ whatever you want without thinking, but
> 
> I did quite a bit of thinking before posting it. Not sure what made you 
> think otherwise.

Well, it certainly appears to me that your proposal to move metadata from the working tree (where it is visible, and easily editable with the editor of _your_ choice) to the index (where it is hidden, and could only be edited with _yet another_ git command) is not well thought through.

It certainly would make some common operation much more complicated, for no gain at all.

Should you still not be convinced, please find some convincing mails by Linus (which are much longer than I would have the patience to write) where he goes into detail _why_ it is _wrong_ to _hide_ things away from the working tree.

(Just a small hint: git is much more powerful _because_ it keeps metadata visibly in the filesystem.)

As for your proposal to munge the different metadata files into sections of _one_ file: I doubt that this is "cleaner" or "more elegant" than what we have now. For one, if a script fscks up one file, it does not fsck up the others.

For another, scripts do not have to jump through hoops to edit the metadata files, as long as they do not have sections (containing completely independent informations).

Ciao, Dscho