On Sat, 19 May 2007, David Härdeman wrote:
I recently had the idea to store and track /etc using git. When googling the
topic I came across the "Using git to store /etc" thread from the end of last
year which provided some interesting details on what would be necessary.
It seems the file metadata (owner, group, mode, xattrs, etc) was the big
stumbling point, so I wrote up a tool over the last few days which allows the
metadata to be stored in a separate file which can be stored along with the
rest of the data in the repo (or separately).
This is also useful for tripwire type checks and for other types of storage
which drops some of the metadata (tar comes to mind)...
The tool (metastore) is available from: git://git.hardeman.nu/metastore.git
Not completely cleaned up yet (it lacks a real README and some Makefile
targets) but I hope it might be useful to others (it sure is to me).
Please CC me on any replies.
as I understand the issue, the problem isn't creating a tool to store the
metadata, but in integrating things with git.
when checking something in a pre-commit hook needs to run the tool to
store the data.
git supports this and it's pretty simple to do this.
however when checking things out there are approaches
1. modify git to have a post-checkout hook to set the metadata to match
what was stored at checkin and accept the fact that this leaves a
window where the file has the wrong metadata on it (between when the
file is written and when the hook runs), or use a staging area to have
copies of the files during check-in and check-out
2. modify git to know that it needs to check some files out before any
others and use an expernal program to write the files to disk. Then
this program can use the data stored at checkin to write the files with
the appropriate metadata
unforutnantly until one of these is done by someone the utility of
programs like your metastore are limited.
David Lang
