Sam Vilain <sam@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Dmitry Kakurin wrote: >>> 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 - 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
