using bazaar as root

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Am Freitag, den 19.12.2008, 17:08 -0600 schrieb Rahul Nabar:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 4:37 PM, John Arbash Meinel
> <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> >
> > The primary issue is that we don't version the file permissions. We
> > generally *preserve* them, but if you delete a file completely, and then
> > use "bzr revert" to bring it back, it will come back based on your
> > umask. So likely to either be rw-rw-r-- or rw-r--r--- (umask 0002, 0022
> > respectively).
> 
> Thanks John. I guess I should be safe till I don't have to do a revert
> for a deleted file but just on a modified file. Just curious: Why does
> bzr not preserve permissions? Is it just storage economy or are there
> deeper issues?
It's problematic to preserve permissions in a portable manner. Most
POSIX-like systems use simple file mods (r/w/x for file user / group /
everybody), but platforms like Windows use more complex ACLs and some
POSIX platforms (including Linux also support POSIX ACLs). It's not
possible to 1-to-1 conversions between them.

In your case you would probably also want to store the owner and group
of the file. This is also not trivial to do, since you don't want to
store the uid / gid (they can refer to different users on different
systems) nor do you want to store the username / groupname (what if they
don't exist on a system on which you do the checkout, or if they are
actually different users).

I'm not sure if this means file permissions will never be supported, but
there are certainly other features higher on the wishlist.

Cheers,

Jelmer
-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
Jabber: jelmer at jabber.fsfe.org
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