Re: vc-git bug with top-level repositories

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: Claus <address@hidden>,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:34:19 -0400
> 
> >> ;; As a heuristic, we stop looking up the hierarchy of
> >> ;; directories as soon as we find a directory belonging
> >> ;; to another user.  This should save us from looking in
> >> ;; things like /net and /afs.  This assumes that all the
> >> ;; files inside a project belong to the same user.
> >> [...]
> 
> > This assumption is only valid for Posix platforms...
> 
> >> So in my case "c:/work/foo/bar/somefile" had a different owner than
> >> "c:/work/foo/bar" so Emacs stopped looking for .git further upwards
> --> no version control enabled.
> 
> > ...as this case clearly shows.  I think VC needs to limit this
> > heuristic to Posix platforms only.
> 
> I do not see where is the Posixness of my assumption (presumably
> because Posix is basically all I know).  Could you explain?

Perhaps I misunderstood, but the text above sounds like it assumes
that if /foo/bar/baz is owned by me, but /foo/bar is owned by someone
other than myself, /foo cannot be reasonably owned by me.  This might
be a norm on Posix platforms, where no one except myself will do
anything inside my home directory, but on Windows it is very common to
find exceptions to that rule, because everything is world-readable and
world-writable, unless you take special measures to enforce a security
policies that prevent this.

> The assumption of my heuristic is that all the files in a given project
> belong to the same user.  Clearly there's nothing that guarantees it's
> always true, but for "programming projects", it's probably true in
> 99.9999% of the cases.  If the "project" is a complete OS image OTOH,
> it's not going to work.

Well, in that case, perhaps you need to add an option to disable this
heuristic, since if someone is unfortunate enough to be in the alleged
0.0001%, she will need a fire escape.