bazaar-ng and permissions

[Geoff Crompton]

Martin Pool wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 10:30 +1000, Geoff Crompton wrote: 
> 
>>Can I ask how file permissions are handled in bazaar-ng, or are going to 
>>be handled?
>>
>>I ask because I'm interested in using revision control tools for 
>>managing /etc directories. In this case file permissions are very 
>>important, where as in your more traditional programming cases it is 
>>less important.
> 
> 
> The point of bzr is source code management, so it's not going to try to
> replace rdist or similar systems.   But if we can accommodate it, that's
> great.

rdist doesn't scratch the itch I'm going for. I'm after a revision 
control tool that can be used for /etc directories. Unfortunately most 
revision control tools are, as you've mentioned, about source code 
management.

>>I realise this causes interoperability issues. One thought I had was to 
>>enable a per project option to enable file permissions revisioning, with 
>>the understanding that it makes the project less portable.
> 
> 
> It's not just portability.  For most source trees, managing permissions
> (aside from an x bit) is not the right thing to do: i might have two
> checkouts of the same tree, one which is group writable, and I don't
> want to always get conflicts on the permissions.  Same for group
> ownership.
> 
> That said I think it would be OK to turn on permission tracking as a
> per-file property.

Sounds good, especially if it was easy to do, and especially if it was 
possible to do in a pattern matching fashion, similar to ignores.

-- 
Geoff Crompton
Debian System Administrator
Strategic Data
+61 3 9340 9000