Question

I have a Git project that it’s a bit special because the files in the tree are generated by two different users. Example:

# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 13 ivan ivan  4096 2012-02-02 16:52 .
drwxrwxrwx 32 root root  4096 2012-01-28 21:37 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 ivan ivan  4096 2012-02-07 20:41 system
drwxr-xr-x  2 ivan ivan  4096 2012-02-07 20:41 compatibility
drwxr-xr-x 33 ivan ivan  4096 2011-12-08 18:13 resources
drwxr-xr-x  8 ivan ivan  4096 2012-02-07 20:41 .git
-rw-r--r--  1 ivan ivan   307 2012-02-02 16:52 .gitignore
-rw-r--r--  1 bulk bulk   700 2011-11-01 20:10 base.log
.....

Git is controled just by one user (ivan) but a daemon produces files assigned to bulk user. Everything was well whilst the daemon added new files, but when the daemon changed a file, git stopped working saying:

error: unable to unlink old 'base.log' (Permission denied)

I know the best option is to make the daemon run as ivan user, but that’s technically difficult. The question is: is there any way to deal with this kind of situations in Git? I mean, I just want to do “git checkout branch” without having problems with user permissions.

Answer 1

Add you git user (ivan) to the ‘bulk’ group.

Debian:

sudo adduser ivan bulk   # and relogin

Others (FC, Redhat and similar?):

usermod -a -G bulk ivan

Everything should be fine. To have write access (i.e. so you can checkout, merge etc. you working tree), change permissions to allow the goup write access:

sudo chmod g+rw bulk.log

Alternatives:

• store archives (using cpio or tar, which are both capable of preserving permissions)
• possible combine with bup
• store permissions as text or scripts, see also How to preserve the file permission in git?