Re: empty directories

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

Full permissions might be easy enough to resurrect, but since it's
still pointless without ownership, that really isn't even relevant.

I'd not call it entirely pointless without ownership: under most
systems, only root can do chown, so for example a private backup of a
home directory usually has unique ownership (and nothing but the
normal ownership could be restored by a user, anyway).

However, once the user is member of more than a single group and
actually makes _use_ of that, we are getting on thin ice.  But at
least different group ownership is usually much better contained (and
thus reconstructible manually in the case of an emergency) as the
permissions are.

Since tracking permissions would be a per-project decision (nothing
else makes any sense), it should be workable to amend the tree records
themselves by adding ownership and ACL and whatever else optionally
right there in-place if one figures out a good syntax for it.

One still needs to come up with a good and flexible way to implement
policies: what kind of permissions/ownership data will be let into the
repository from workdir/pushing, and what won't?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum