Re: [Gnu-arch-users] BUG: feature request: 'tla chmod' which 'touch'es files

[David Allouche]

I take that post (it could be one of many other posts in this thread) to
express my support to many points raised in that discussion.

= Backward compatible inode-sig =

The current inode-sig are flawed. When that is fixed, it would be
simpler just to force the user to remove the old one.

That is not very costly, and otherwise we may still have problems months
or years from now, caused by corrupted revlibs using old inode-sigs.

To stick to the principle of least surprise, newer tla should detect old
inode-sigs in the revlib and ask the user to remove the contents of the
revlib (with an example command or a pointer to more documentation). 

Pristine trees with old inode sigs should just be ignored, since many
users are not going to be even aware of their presence, and they cannot
easily be wiped out from all working trees.

= Read and write bits =

In source trees, only the execute bits for files are important. All the
other permissions are irrelevant and only cause noise.

Files in revision library should be read-only to make it more difficult
to corrupt a revlib by editing a hardlinked tree.

The less common use cases (home and /etc dirs) need support for
additional ownership information, like user, group, sticky bits (not
sure if they are supported by tla), extend attributes (for ACL) etc.

The current permission versioning does not fill the bill well for the
less common cases anyway, and is problematic in the more common cases.

= Disclaimer =

That's gratuitous kibtzing, just my two cents, etc.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa