[Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch with 'special files'

[Matthieu Moy]

Josh England <address@hidden> writes:

> I need to retain permissions on all files, 

Permission *and* ownership (arch doesn't store ownership. Most
revision control systems won't because they're not designed to be used
as root).

> I'm not familiar with all the internals of arch, but all of this is
> conceivable and should be fairly straight-forward since tar is the
> file-store.

Actually, tar is just the way to serialize a changeset. The changeset
mainly contains patches, not the files themselves. For example, arch
manages symbolic links, but AFAIK, there are no symbolic links in arch
changesets, but a description of the link in a "normal" file.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/tutorial/changeset-format.html

> Changesets of 'special' files would simply invoke 'mkfifo' or 'mknod' as
> appropriate instead of 'patch' (or whatever).  This is, of course, very
> UNIX-centric, but all the code could be #ifdef'd out for other
> platforms.

That's a personal opinion (I'm not a tla developer) but I don't think
you can hope an inclution of this in tla's mainline.

-- 
Matthieu