Re: tracking perms/ownership

[copied to gmane after sending personal copy by accident, since mails
 of me don't arrive on the list from my work account.  Sorry for the
 duplication.]

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:


[make install]

See? Those ownership things are restorable *as*root*, but that
doesn't mean that everybody should do development as root. In fact,
I'd argue that any system that is set up so that you have to develop
and merge things while being root is pretty damn broken.

Which means that any such environment *has* to encode the owndership
*separately* from the actual filesystem ownership. Because doing it
in the filesystem simply isn't sane.

But in this case you have a work directory and an installation
directory.  And you have an installation procedure.  No tracking is
involved at all.

So yes, you could have an insane piece of crap that actually tracks
file ownership in the filesystem, and requires people to be root.

In your example, neither installed files nor ownership are tracked in
the filesystem.  Both are "tracked" in the Makefile.  Or rather than
being tracked, they are explicitly catered for by the user.

Or you could use a ".gitattributes" file or similar _external_
tracking method that allows even people who cannot actually set
ownership to work with it.

git is a content _tracker_.  It tracks contents, also contents that
move around.  If it can't track the permissions moving around as well,
it's sort of pointless to integrate this into git: if you have to
manage the stuff yourself, anyway, there is no point in creating the
illusion that it is done by git.

Your choice. But I know which one I'd choose.

That's fine.  But you don't actually need git at all to implement your
choice, so this is orthogonal to whether having an option to do it
inside of git might be worth having.

-- 
David Kastrup