From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Paul Jackson Subject: Re: Storing permissions Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 01:13:01 -0700 Organization: SGI Message-ID: <20050417011301.0b341d5d.pj@sgi.com> References: <20050416230058.GA10983@ucw.cz> <118833cc05041618017fb32a2@mail.gmail.com> <20050416183023.0b27b3a4.pj@sgi.com> <42620092.9040402@dwheeler.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: torvalds@osdl.org, mwelinder@gmail.com, mj@ucw.cz, git@vger.kernel.org X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Sun Apr 17 10:10:09 2005 Return-path: Received: from vger.kernel.org ([12.107.209.244]) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1DN4r0-0000LG-Ja for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Sun, 17 Apr 2005 10:10:06 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261280AbVDQINw (ORCPT ); Sun, 17 Apr 2005 04:13:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261281AbVDQINw (ORCPT ); Sun, 17 Apr 2005 04:13:52 -0400 Received: from zeus1.kernel.org ([204.152.191.4]:44957 "EHLO zeus1.kernel.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261280AbVDQINu (ORCPT ); Sun, 17 Apr 2005 04:13:50 -0400 Received: from omx3.sgi.com (omx3-ext.sgi.com [192.48.171.20]) by zeus1.kernel.org (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id j3H8DksS002262 for ; Sun, 17 Apr 2005 01:13:47 -0700 Received: from cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (cthulhu.engr.sgi.com [192.26.80.2]) by omx3.sgi.com (8.12.11/8.12.9/linux-outbound_gateway-1.1) with ESMTP id j3H8aiPO009821; Sun, 17 Apr 2005 01:36:47 -0700 Received: from vpn2 (mtv-vpn-hw-pj-2.corp.sgi.com [134.15.25.219]) by cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (SGI-8.12.5/8.12.5) with SMTP id j3H8D5lU15333004; Sun, 17 Apr 2005 01:13:06 -0700 (PDT) To: dwheeler@dwheeler.com In-Reply-To: <42620092.9040402@dwheeler.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 1.0.0 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org David wrote: > There's a minor reason to write out ALL the perm bit data, but There's always the 'configurable option' approach. Someone, I doubt Linus will have any interest in it, could volunteer to make the masks of st_mode, used when storing and recovering file permissions, be configurable by some environment variable settings, which default to whatever Linus provided. But, in general, if you want a generalized backup system, git is not it. Git skips all files whose name begins with the dot '.' character, and anything that is not a regular file or directory. Git makes no concessions to working adequately on file systems lacking normal inode numbers (such as smb, fat, vfat). Git obscures the archive format a modest amount, for pure speed and to encourage use only via appropriate wrappers. Git is tuned for blazing speed at the operations that Linus needs, not for trivial recovery, using the most basic tools, under harsh circumstances. The basic idea of using such an 'object database' (though I dislike that term -- too high falutin vague) of files stored by their hash is a good one. But a different core implementation is needed for backups. I have one that I use for my own backups, but it is written in Python, and uses MD5, one or the other of which likely disqualifies it from further consideration by half the readers of this list. -- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson 1.650.933.1373, 1.925.600.0401