VCS comparison table

[Matthieu Moy]

"Tim Webster" <tdwebste at gmail.com> writes:

> First I want to say every SCM I know of sucks when it comes to tracking
> configurations, simply because they don't record or restore file metadata,
> like perms, ownership, and acl.

That's not a simple matter.

Tracking ownership hardly makes sense as soon as you have two
developers on the same project. What does it mean to checkout a file
belonging to user foo and group bar on a system not having such user
and group?

Just restoring the complete user/group/other rwx permission is already
a mess. In my experience (GNU Arch did this):

1) It sucks ;-). Me working with umask 022 so that my collegues can
   "cp -r" from me, working on a project with people having umask 077,
   I got some files not readable, some yes, well, a mess. *I* have set
   my umask, and *I* want my tools to obey.

2) It's a security hole. If you work with people having umask=002 (not
   indecent if your default group contains just you), you end-up with
   world-writable files in your ${HOME}.

That said, it can be interesting to have it, but disabled by default.

The 'x' bit, OTOH, is definitely useful.

-- 
Matthieu