Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > One thing that scares me about a regular "ln" between the worktree and > odb is that you are very susceptible to corrupting the repository by > modifying the worktree file with regular tools. If they do a complete > rewrite and atomic rename (or link) to put the new file in place, that > is OK. But opening the file for appending, or general writing, is bad. Very true. > You can get some safety with the immutable attribute (which applies to > the inode itself, and thus any path that hardlinks to it). But setting > that usually requires being root. And it creates other irritations for > normal use (you have to unset it before even removing the hardlink). As a regular user, "chmod a-w" has the same characteristics (works at the inode level) but without "cannot remove it" downside. It used to be sufficient in RCS and CVS days, though, as a signal that you are only to look at it without touching it, to "chmod a-w" a path that is checked out but not for modifying. Some editors even offer to do chmod u+w for you when saving, so if we want absolute safety, it may not be enough. > It would be nice if there was some portable copy-on-write abstraction we > could rely on, but I don't think there is one. ;-)
