hg to track file permission

[Matt Mackall]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 06:33:08AM -0700, Eric M. Hopper wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 14:15 +0530, Aneesh Kumar wrote:
> > Hi, 
> > 
> > Can i change then file permission of a file tracked by mercurial and
> > generate a diff that can be applied to a different repository ?
> 
> I've been thinking about this and other issues, and thinking that hg
> could really use a tracked metadata system like (I'm muttering the evil
> word here) Subversion.

Mercurial can already track arbitrary per-revision metadata. But it's
used for exactly one thing right now: tracking renames.

Allowing arbitrary metadata is a bad bad bad idea as most of it has
ill-defined semantics for various operations like update, rename,
merge, etc. And if you make it available, people will want to abuse it
for everything under the sun.
 
But lack of arbitrary metadata was never a complaint I heard against
CVS until SVN decided to add it. That's because there are other ways
to do just about everything you'd do with it, without opening that can
of worms.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.