Other uses for tree versioning systems

[Martin Pool]

On  9 Jun 2005, Hans Ulrich Niedermann <arch at n-dimensional.de> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this post is to start a discussion about what bazaar-ng may do for the
> world besides just making software development easier.
> 
> On http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/bzr/bugzilla.html, Martin
> writes that every bugzilla installation is basically a branch of the
> project proper: You install the upstream software, adapt it for your
> needs. You then continue to update the system from upstream from time
> to time, preserving your modifications.
> 
> So far, so good. But this line of reasoning doesn't consider a very
> important aspect about a software installation: Properly handling
> "real" permissions.
> 
> Of course, bazaar-ng, arch and other versioning systems track the
> execute bit, but for a proper software installation, you need more
> control over the permissions: If you really want to go all the way
> here, you'll have to store information about ownership, the full 12
> permission bits, extended attributes, ACLs and even system specific
> markers such as the SELinux attributes.

This gets pretty complex; it might be installed as user 'bugs' on one
machine and 'bugzilla' on another, etc.

Possibly for complex cases it's better to have a shell or Python
script which sets things the right way, and that could be run from
e.g. a post-update hook.


> If that need can be addressed by just not discounting the idea
> outright, and implementing it just requires to consequently finish the
> basic design which has been there in the first place, I think this is
> at least worth a try.

I think it's an interesting idea.  At the very least I would like to
have the foundation and hooks needed to support it.

-- 
Martin