Re: Using GIT to store /etc (Or: How to make GIT store all file permission bits)

> Kyle Moffett wrote:
>>
>> I've recently become somewhat interested in the idea of using GIT to 
>> store the contents of various folders in /etc.  However after a bit of 
>> playing with this, I discovered that GIT doesn't actually preserve all 
>> permission bits since that would cause problems with the more 
>> traditional software development model.  I'm curious if anyone has done 
>> this before; and if so, how they went about handling the permissions and 
>> ownership issues.
>> 
>> I spent a little time looking over how GIT stores and compares 
>> permission bits; trying to figure out if it's possible to patch in a new 
>> configuration variable or two; say "preserve_all_perms" and 
>> "preserve_owner", or maybe even "save_acls".  It looks like standard 
>> permission preservation is fairly basic; you would just need to patch a 
>> few routines which alter the permissions read in from disk or compare 
>> them with ones from the database.  On the other hand, it would appear 
>> that preserving ownership or full POSIX ACLs might be a bit of a challenge.
> 
> It's a great idea, something I would like to do, and something I've 
> suggested before.  You could dig through the mailing list archives, if 
> you're motivated.
> 
> I actively use git to version, store and distribute an exim mail 
> configuration across six servers.  So far my solution has been a 'fix 
> perms' script, or using the file perm checking capabilities of cfengine.