The first official release of Metastore: metadata tool for file system trees (opens in new tab)

Thanks for working on this and posting it to hn. The security concerns around storing /etc improperly (i.e. like publicly in a version control system) are well known, but if done right, it could really be useful.

Let me quote README file first:

    It was originally written as a supplement to git, which does not store
    all metadata, making it unsuitable for e.g. storing /etc in a
    repository.
    
    metastore can also be helpful if you want to create a tarball of a file
    tree and make sure that "everything" (e.g. xattrs, mtime, owner, group)
    is stored along with the files.

You may use it to store stuff on filesystem that doesn't support perms, owner & group for instance, like FAT, yet still be able to restore it later. Well, FAT doesn't support lot of things, so it's maybe a bad example. Anyway, I did use metastore to store metadata of some ext4 filesystem tree before backuping it on NTFS. It worked quite well.

I think that metastore will become much more valuable tool, when some planned stuff will be implemented.

https://github.com/przemoc/metastore/issues/6

https://github.com/przemoc/metastore/issues/7

Drafts described there are not finalized and my view on some matters changed a bit. I'll try to update descriptions one day. metastore needs also some modularization to provide better OS-dependent stuff like xattrs.

All in all metastore will need more or less substantial reworking, to the point where rewriting it and providing converter from binary format may be a simpler solution and leading to cleaner (and thus more maintainable) code.