vfat

[Aaron Bentley]

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marc gonzalez-carnicer wrote:
> I use bzr to sync a collection of personal info files, such
> as addresses, todo list, etc (the information usually
> stored on a pda). I keep a repository at my computer
> at work, which runs windows. Since (afaik) it is not
> possible to mount ext2 (or ext3, ...) partitions under
> windows, even using cygwin, I am forced to use vfat
> for that computer.

Actually, NTFS support on Linux is quite decent now.  (Admittedly, it's
a FUSE filesystem, but it seems to handle writes safely.)

> I have a problem when I perform merges with a pen
> drive to bring data at home. bzr status tells that
> all the files properties have changed, and I record
> more changes than I want to.

This is a problem with vfat-on-linux, where the execute bit is assumed
to be meaningful.  Under Windows, we know it's not meaningful, so no
problem.

Just to be clear: You have no ext2 partitions on this machine at all?
It all uses VFAT?  Or is it just that your pen drive uses VFAT and
you're doing the merge on your pen drive itself?

If you have an ext2/3 partition somewhere on the machine, you can create
a checkout of your pen drive and do the merging there:

"bzr checkout /media/disk/path/to/branch /path/to/ext2/partition"

> This page on the bazaar web site says vfat is not
> appropiate for use with bzr. But then, what can i do?
> Is there a hack i can do?

It's not that FAT32 is completely unusable with bzr, but support for it
is not something we've focused on.  However, using VFAT under Linux is
not going to work well until we can detect that the execute bit is
meaningless.

I tried some quick hacks, but they didn't work.

Aaron
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