Retaining file permissions with Git
I want to version control my web server as described in Version control for my web server, by creating a git repo out of my /var/www directory. My hope was that I would then be able to push web content from our dev server to github, pull it to our production server, and spend the rest of the day at the pool.
Apparently a kink in my plan is that Git won't respect file permissions (I haven't tried it, only reading about it now.) I guess this makes sense in that different boxes are liable to have different user/group setups. But if I wanted to force permissions to propagate, knowing my servers are configured the same, do I have any options? Or is there an easier way to approach what I'm trying to do?
Answer
Git is Version Control System, created for software development, so from the whole set of modes and permissions it stores only executable bit (for ordinary files) and symlink bit. If you want to store full permissions, you need third party tool, like git-cache-meta (mentioned by VonC), or Metastore (used by etckeeper). Or you can use IsiSetup, which IIRC uses git as backend.
See Interfaces, frontends, and tools page on Git Wiki.