On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Yann Dirson <ydirson@linagora.com> wrote:
quoted text
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 09:56:21PM +0100, Marius Storm-Olsen wrote:
>> Yann Dirson said the following on 08.12.2009 15:37:
>> >On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 03:23:55PM +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>> >>You can follow the discussion here:
>> >>http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/issues/detail?id=288
>> >>
>> >>I believe the reason is something like "because someone suggested
>> >>it, and no one disagreed". Do you have a good argument why it
>> >>shouldn't be the default (other than "it's a change", because
>> >>changing it back now would also be a change)?
>> >
>> >Depending on the opinion of the Eclipse guys on this issue about
>> >"writing to hidden files only says 'could not write'", which
>> >arguably could be seen as a bug on their side, we can see changing
>> >this behaviour back to the default on the msysgit side as either a
>> >(possibly temporary) workaround for a known eclipse bug, or as
>> >getting again interoperable with egit.
>>
>> Dot-files on unix are considered hidden. It's the only way files are
>> hidden there. Not so on Windows. Dot-files are just like any normal
>> file, and you need to mark a file hidden.
>>
>> So, the logic of egit, that *actually* hidden files should not be
>> written to, but dot-files should, seems to me to be a bug in egit.
>> There should be no reason why egit shouldn't be able to write to any
>> file, pending permissions. I'd say file a bug report with egit.
>
> Actually it is not egit who is unable to write to the file, but
> eclipse itself, and I do tend to think it is a bug in eclipse.  But
> now, even if we can convince the eclipse guys that it is a bug, it
> will be some time before a new release with this bug fixed gets
> published.
>
> So IMHO it would makes sense, for the sake of usability, to not
> activate the "hide dotfiles" feature by default.  It is easier for
> someone seeing unwanted dotfiles to find the switch to hide them, than
> for someone getting a "could not write" message from eclipse to
> understand that there is a seemingly-unrelate switch for msysgit to
> avoid this situation.
>

Actually, I think it makes much more sense to put a note of the issue
in the release-notes. I don't want people to lose features because
Eclipse, an IDE I don't even use, is broken. Since Eclipse is the
culprit here, I think it's the Eclipse that should "take the hit", not
the rest of us.

This of course assumes that hidden dotfiles is a feature that people
want, which is what I assumed was the reason why it was added in the
first place. Personally I don't care about this feature, since I have
the "show hidden files"-feature turned on.

quoted text
> But maybe the situation is not so clear.  That "hide dotfiles" was
> implemented so that ".git" at first, and then ".git*" files do not
> clutter the view of the project.  But then, if a git repo has other
> dotfiles, those are really *part of* the versionned stuff, so I do not
> see why those should be hidden at all.  After all, the .project,
> .classpath, and other eclipse project files have that name on windows
> too, and it will indeed *confuse* people to get them hidden.
>
> So should we have 2 classes of dotfiles, those "private to git", and
> the others, one class being hidden while the others are not ?  I am
> not sure at all this would be a good idea either.  Or maybe we should
> only get .git hidden - after all, that one is the only real metadata
> not part of the versionned stuff itself ?
>
> Maybe we should add some sort of "core.hidedotfiles = dotgitonly"
> setting, and make that the default ?  That one does not appear to
> cause any problems to jgit, and eclipse itself has not business with
> it, so it would IMHO make sense.
>
> Opinions ?
>

IF we were to go down this path, perhaps it would be even better to
use some sort of file-pattern or even squeeze this into gitattributes?
I guess something like ".* +hidden" should emulate the unix behaviour
(given that we add a hidden attribute). I don't think we have a global
gitattributes file though, so it'd have to be added to each repo where
the effect is desired, I guess.

-- 
Erik "kusma" Faye-Lund
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