Re: git and symlinks as tracked content

[Andreas Gal <gal@uci.edu>]

>  - S_IFCHR/S_IFBLK (0020000 or 0060000), with the 20-byte SHA1 not being a 
>    SHA1 at all, but just the major:minor numbers in some nice binary 
>    encoding. Probably: two network byte order 32-bit values, with twelve 
>    bytes of some non-zero signature (the SHA1 of all zeroes should be 
>    avoided, so the signature really should be soemthing else than just 
>    twelve bytes of zero).

Yuck. Thats really ugly. Right now all files have a uniform touch to them. 
For every hash you can locate the file, determine its type/tag, unpack it, 
and check the SHA1 hash. The proposal above breaks all that. Why not just 
introduce a new object type "dev" and put major minor in there. It 
will still always hash to the same SHA1 hash value, but fits much better in the 
overall design. 

Andreas