From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: empty directories Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:25:21 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: References: <1187716461.5986.71.camel@beauty> <20070821134030.b763e9d3.seanlkml@sympatico.ca> <1187817948.5986.159.camel@beauty> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii Cc: git@vger.kernel.org To: Josh England X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Thu Aug 23 01:26:02 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git@gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1INzaL-0000Pz-Ia for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:26:01 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1762384AbXHVXZd (ORCPT ); Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:25:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1760132AbXHVXZc (ORCPT ); Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:25:32 -0400 Received: from smtp2.linux-foundation.org ([207.189.120.14]:45238 "EHLO smtp2.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758826AbXHVXZc (ORCPT ); Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:25:32 -0400 Received: from imap1.linux-foundation.org (imap1.linux-foundation.org [207.189.120.55]) by smtp2.linux-foundation.org (8.13.5.20060308/8.13.5/Debian-3ubuntu1.1) with ESMTP id l7MNPR9p008073 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:25:28 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by imap1.linux-foundation.org (8.13.5.20060308/8.13.5/Debian-3ubuntu1.1) with ESMTP id l7MNPLBA010320; Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:25:22 -0700 In-Reply-To: <1187817948.5986.159.camel@beauty> X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.75 required=5 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.0-osdl_revision__1.28__ X-MIMEDefang-Filter: lf$Revision: 1.185 $ X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.53 on 207.189.120.14 Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Josh England wrote: > > The main need is for file ownership/permission, which has been touched > on before. When I clone an image, I really want an *identical* clone, > in every way. It seems as though git had this functionality but > scrapped it due to issues with umask and merge type problems? Well, git had all permission bits, but never ownership. And yes, using more than the one user-x-bit ended up being totally unusable for source code, because of different people having different umask, so we effectively dropped the permission bits too (although the data format was retained, so we could re-introduce then with some flag that says "honor all permission bits, not just the x bit"). But the ownership thing we've never even tried to support, since it was so obviously not something that was appropriate for a distributed project. So if you want an identical clone with ownership and (full) permissions, you really do need to have some alternate way to fill in the blanks. I've argued that ".gitattributes" may be an acceptable alternate, especially since ownership is often something that is less than "per file", and more often "has certain patterns". > So the question is: would there be any way to bring this functionality > back as a non-default configurable option? For those of us who need the > functionality, we'd be more than willing to live with some of the > side-effects. Full permissions might be easy enough to resurrect, but since it's still pointless without ownership, that really isn't even relevant. But if .gitattributes would work, you probably could introduce both full permissions and ownership rules there. We read git attributes for *other* reasons when checking files out _anyway_, ie we need the CRLF attribute stuff, so adding ownership attributes would not be at all odd. Linus