Re: Tracking file metadata in git -- fix metastore or enhance git?

[Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com>]

Ignoring any potentially flame-ish comments in the shared interest of
factual discussion and eventual consensus followed by progress; please
do the same :)


On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 21:58, Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de> wrote:

> This might be an alternative. RichiH, what are the requirements?

The main use case from my/our POV is to track mtime etc to maintain
relative and absolute differences which can be extremely useful for
data even if it's not needed for code files.


> I fear that the dotfile way will meet them better, considering
> that they are versioned together, not separately, and what you
> told me quickly about the idea.

Points to consider:

* In most cases I can think of, it would be preferable to track
changes in metadata along with the actual files.

* It should be possible for other repositories to ignore this metadata.

* I am not sure if notes are suitable for this. Using notes.displayRef
to hide those notes is an option, but it would force everyone to set
this up locally. Else, it would be very spammy.

* .gitattributes is too important to fill with potentially thousands
of lines, imo. Using it to define what metadata should be stored would
make sense, though.

* would a .gitmetadata make sense for storage? Alternatively, a
.git/objects/??/*.metadata per object could make sense.


Thoughts?
Richard