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

Sam Vilain [off-list ref] writes:

Dmitry Kakurin wrote:

quoted

quoted

A tree that has .gitattributes (and I am assuming in the longer
term you can use "ignore" and "precious" in .gitattributes
instead of using .gitignore) POINTS TO A BLOB already, so what
you are saying does not add anything to what we already have,
other than that you are renaming .gitattributes to "META ENTRY".

Almost true! The difference is: META BLOBS are not created as files in
the workspace (not during checkout, not ever).
In order to edit it you'd have to use 'git meta' command.
So once again, there is only one place to check for metadata - the index.

Can I just chime in here and express my distaste for this idea, on
several grounds, but the summary is that svn does it this way, so it
must be wrong.

These files which store metadata would be stored in a way that is
"in another dimension" to the project files, despite being a part of
the history.  That means that all tools built to deal with regular
files and directories will not be able to merge the changes to the
attributes without special support.  I think this is broken.

That presumes that a good way to merge attributes is to use a text
file merge algorithm, complete with finding diff context lines in a
basically unchanged order.

And I don't see that this is a sensible merge strategy at all.  No
matter where the attributes are stored, whether in a file or somewhere
else, any useful merge strategy would require an algorithm quite
different from the currently used one.

Now this might be a case for pluggable merge strategies: after all,
there might be non-git related files with similar unordered per-line
merge semantics, or files expressing some information about files.

As far as file properties goes, I still like Linus' idea of making
these files which are accessed by treating the file as a directory
(eg filename.txt/ACL, filename.txt/mime-type), and that approach
could be represented in git well.

Well, at least _some_ interesting Reiser4 idea resurfaces.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum