hg to track file permission

[Eric Hopper]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 10:10:12AM -0700, Matt Mackall wrote:
> 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.

I think the reason for this as nobody really thought about CVS's
meta-data as meta-data.  It had a keyword substitution mode, and there
were a set of coventions people used to maintain permissions.  And I saw
people annoyed about how those things worked, but nobody sat down and
said "The way this meta-data stuff is handled is awful.".

But, I agree with you about fuzzy semantics and people shoving random
silly things into it.

But I think with some modifications to filters this could be implemented
outside the core of Mercurial and people could decide for themselves how
it should be handled.  There's already a piece of meta-data filters are
planned to be used for, and that's whether or not a file needs to have
its line-endings translated.  One way of implementing this would be for
the filter to look at a version controlled database file that contained
an entry for every file in the repository.  Though I think that's a
silly way, it illustrates my point.  :-)

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  --- Thomas Jefferson
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."  -- Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (hopper at omnifarious.org  http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
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