On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

> David Härdeman <david@hardeman.nu> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:53:01PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
>>> also sprach David Härdeman <david@hardeman.nu> [2007.09.19.2016 +0100]:
>>>> But I agree, if any changes were made to git, I'd advocate adding
>>>> arbitrary attributes to files (much like xattrs) in name=value
>>>> pairs, then any extended metadata could be stored in those
>>>> attributes and external scripts/tools could use them in some way
>>>> that makes sense...and also make sure to only update them when it
>>>> makes sense.
>>>
>>> So where would those metdata be stored in your opinion?
>>
>> I'm not sufficiently versed in the internals of git to have an
>> informed opinion :)
>
> I think we have something like a length count for file names in index
> and/or tree.  We could just put the (sorted) attributes after a NUL
> byte in the file name and include them in the count.  It would also
> make those artificially longer file names work more or less when
> sorting them for deltification.

the problem with this is dealing with the attributes outside of git 
(especially when the filesystem can't store the attributes nativly, 
specificly including things like owners when not running as root)

this is one of the reasons for talking about useing a seperate file for 
the attributes (the other being the ability to minimize the impact to 
git-core of tracking attributes)

David Lang