User metadata support

[Andrey]

On 20 November 2006 (Mon) 01:54, Guenther Brunthaler wrote:
> * Additional permission bits.

That's what I was always dreaming of. Mercurial could become a nice backup 
solution for /etc files and things like that if it preserved permission bits, 
owner, group and whatever the user wants to be preserved. Metadata and custom 
hooks is a nice way to do it.

> * Line-ending conversion.
> * Character set conversion.

Great idea, too. Commands like hg cat, hg diff, hg export, etc just have to do 
automatic encoding conversion to produce what user expects to see. And they 
obviously need to know file encoding and line ending style for that.

There are, of course, lots of other nice things possible with metadata + 
custom hooks. I'd say, user metadata is just too powerful concept to be left 
out ouf Mercurial.

Perhaps it is possible to store metadata in a special version controlled file 
(say, .hgmetadata file in each directory). Doing this does not require any 
changes to repository format and I can't see any reasons for this to not 
work.

Andrey