using bazaar as root

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ben Finney wrote:
> "Rahul Nabar" <rpnabar at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> 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 […]
>> Just curious: Why does bzr not preserve permissions?
> 
> Since John just said that Bazaar *does* preserve file permissions, I
> presume you wanted to ask why Bazaar doesn't *version-control* the
> file permissions.
> 
> As I understand it, the reason is that Bazaar only version-controls
> those attributes that are generally universal among the file systems
> that Bazaar supports. Attributes like Unix permission bit clusters, or
> Windows ACLs, are not universal among those file systems, so can't be
> meaningfully supported.
> 

I would also point out that Bazaar's primary purpose is to version
*software*. And most of the time when versioning software if I commit as
my user with whatever umask and permissions, that should not be
propagated to you as a user when you update/merge/checkout my changes.

Certainly if you consider that I may develop on a shared machine with a
default umask of 0077 (I don't want anyone else to see it), but on my
local machine it might be 0002.

In short... bzr doesn't version the full set of permissions and user and
group because

a) They are not really portable
b) You normally do *not* want them
c) It is harder to do so and have it work in all situations.

John
=:->

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