From: Matthieu Moy Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:14:46 GMT Subject: Re: VCS comparison table Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <72877ab10610190757u3d2b4df0o204c6ffd73af69b4@mail.gmail.com> "Tim Webster" writes: > First I want to say every SCM I know of sucks when it comes to tracking > configurations, simply because they don't record or restore file metadata, > like perms, ownership, and acl. That's not a simple matter. Tracking ownership hardly makes sense as soon as you have two developers on the same project. What does it mean to checkout a file belonging to user foo and group bar on a system not having such user and group? Just restoring the complete user/group/other rwx permission is already a mess. In my experience (GNU Arch did this): 1) It sucks ;-). Me working with umask 022 so that my collegues can "cp -r" from me, working on a project with people having umask 077, I got some files not readable, some yes, well, a mess. *I* have set my umask, and *I* want my tools to obey. 2) It's a security hole. If you work with people having umask=002 (not indecent if your default group contains just you), you end-up with world-writable files in your ${HOME}. That said, it can be interesting to have it, but disabled by default. The 'x' bit, OTOH, is definitely useful.