Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Link with permissions

[John Meinel]

Miles Bader wrote:
> address@hidden (James Blackwell) writes:
>
> > What will you say to the people that are currently using arch to back up
> > things like /etc and /home ? 
> >
> > There's at least a couple people that distribute their /home/usrname
> > across several machines by using arch.
>
>
> Yeah.  I've notice recently that many people seem to be thinking this
> way "hey if I don't need it, nobody does!"
>
> It _would_ be useful if there were some way to declare which bits you cared
> about in a particular project, e.g., {arch}/=perm-bits-i-care-about.  It
> might work like: (1) have the other, `don't care', bits all turned on in
> the archive, (2) ignore the don't-care bits for comparisons, and (3) use
> umask to set the don't-care bits upon file creation.
>
> -Miles

Well, I can see that $HOME would work, but for people using /etc,
wouldn't they also need the owner/group for the files?

My guess is that tla fits one of those *almost* right for a couple
things, but not really fitting for either.

I think having it configurable would be nice, but I'm not sure how to
make it work on checkout. For instance, if someone publicly posts their
/etc to give other people an idea of how to configure their machine
(perhaps after filtering out a couple sensitive files). It would be nice
if when *I* check out that archive, it doesn't set the owner/group. But
for most of his work, he would want the owner set.

Since tar files can handle all of the permissions/users/etc, it seems
like it would be feasible to implement.

The idea of setting up what permissions bits, owner, etc are important
seems reasonable. In most *code* repositories you only care about the
execute bit. For other ones, you care about more than just permissions.

It might also be nice, though. If tla just kept a file (say in
{arch}/=file-permissions) that just had the owner/group/permissions bits
for all the files in the repository.
If you *want* to set everything to what is in that file, you could run a
reasonably simple bash script.

John
=:->

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