On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, David Kastrup wrote: > Nix <nix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > It's true that git won't natively have any knowledge of that data, > > but Linus has fairly effectively shown that it shouldn't have any > > such knowledge and doesn't need it. > > Last time I looked, git tracked the executable bit. Actually, originally it tracked the whole mode word. It was a total disaster. People who had different umasks etc got mode clashes all the time, and you ended up having silly and unnecessary conflicts. The same would be true (to an even higher degree) if we tracked owner and group information etc. So practically speaking, you want to track the *minimal* possible state, not the maximal one. This is one of those "in theory" vs "in practice" things. In *theory*, it would be nice for an SCM to track everything that is known about a file. In *practice*, that sucks. So this does mean that if you want to explicitly track certain things (ownership and more complete file permissions, or ACL's, or "resource forks", or any number of other things that a file *could* have on various systems), you end up havign to track them in something else than git, or you end up having to track them as a separate "metadata file". One such metadata file is, for example, the ".gitattributes" file. It *could* be used to contain things like path-based rules for ownership, not just things like whether to check out with CRLF etc. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
