[Fwd: [PATCH] bzr tracks permissions]

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> My "<meta-info>" aka properties tag was a generic hook for other
> people to shove stuff that they care about, that *bzr* would not
> explicitly handle.  Basically, if it was in <meta-info> bzr would make
> sure to keep track of it, and probably tell you about conflicts, etc.
> But it wouldn't *understand* it.

In that case you'd have two different ways in the code to do exactly
the same thing. File properties are file properties, no matter if bzr
understand them or not. More specifically, no matter if bzr will
handle them or not, we want to be able to:

* Insert, delete and edit them, no matter if the system
  supports them or not.

* Merge them. Plugins may introduce smartness about how to merge
  selected entries, but in general doing binary/blob-like merge
  would already be wonderful for most uses.

* Be able to react to them. This may be for standard use, like
  executable and binary/not-binary flags, or for other plugin-based
  needs.

[...]
> when you merge, if 2 entries have keys mapping to the same value, then
> it would just be a simple binary conflict. No real merging.

You probably meant to different values, but anyway I got the
idea. Yes, that would be a good start. In the future it could
get fancier and do ancestry based merges, for instance.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net