Versioning file metadata changes with metastore

At CSHL, we keep all of our configuration files under revision control. For various reasons (not the least of which being the .svn directories scattered everywhere which really throw off whatever.d config directories, like modprobe.d), we’ve opted to migrate from Subversion to Mercurial. However, it became incredibly apparent that this would be difficult because Mercurial does not retain any file metadata other than the executable bit — no ownership, no modification time, nothing. This meant that we couldn’t update /etc with a working copy converted off of the existing SVN repo, because this would clobber all of our file permissions, … Continue Reading →