Subject: Re: git and symlinks as tracked content

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 15:56:05 -0700

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> Introducing "dev" type, as Andreas suggests, is wrong.  This
> this should be done in the same way as you suggested for the
> symlink case.  Store a blob object with those chrdev or blkdev
> modes whose contents are of form:
> 
>     major=14
>     minor=4
>     owner=root
>     group=audio
>     perm=0660
> 
> This would impact the diff side least, and for the cache side it
> does not matter in storing and merging.  checkout-cache still
> needs to know about this.
> 

Owner and permissions are part of the tree object, and apply to all file 
types.  The only thing equivalent to file data is the major,minor; 
storing it as a comma-separated decimal ASCII string is probably the 
cleanest, i.e. for your exaple:

14,4

	-hpa