Re: tracking perms/ownership

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
> "Josh England" <jjengla@sandia.gov> writes: 
> > Looking at the index struct, it already has fields in it for file mode
> > uid and gid (woohoo!).
> 
> I can see that storing textual names in gitattributes and having
> the root user run git so that it can chown(), would work.

Well, the nice thing is that even non-root can actually resolve merge 
conflicts and generally use the archive, even if non-root obviously cannot 
then actually set the files to those users/groups!

So handling ownership outside of the actual filesystem, in a separate file 
that git tracks, actually allows you to do things that you couldn't 
otherwise sanely do.

It obviously does have downsides:

> But this is only about checkout.  After you chown a file in the
> work tree and run update-index, next write-tree would not record
> it, as there is no place in tree objects to record uid/gid.

This is a direct consequence of allowing non-root to actually work with 
such a repository: the git-tracked ownership information simply is 
separate, and "git update-index" and friends will never do anything about 
it, since they just can't rely on the *filesystem* user/group information 
anyway (because normal users would never be allowed to set it, anyway).

		Linus