Does git track resource forks?
Git will not track metadata, as those resources are not part of the content of the file (so your answer is "no").
In his "Cross-Platform Version Control" entry, Jakub Narębski comments:
The issue of extra metadata that is not SCM-sane, and which different filesystems can or cannot store.
Examples include full Unix permissions, Unix ownership (and groups file belongs to), other permission-related metadata such as ACL, extra resources tied to file such as EA (extended attributes) for some Linux filesystems or (in)famous resource form in MacOS (resource fork on MacOS vs. xattrs on Linux: issue 5 in Eric Sink article).
This is not an issue for SCM: source code management system to solve.
Preserving extra metadata indiscrimitedly can cause problems, like e.g. full permissions and ownership.
Therefore SCM preserve only limited SCM-sane subset of metadata.
If you need to preserve extra metadata, you can use (in good SCMs) hooks for that, like e.g. etckeeper uses metastore (in Git).
Thomas Tempelmann notes in the comments:
Actually, since macOS 10.12,
textClippings
store the info also in the data fork, inplist
format, with the same keys and values of the resource fork's contents.The only thing that won't work is QuickLook if the rsrc is missing, but opening these files will show the content.
Therefore, storing.textClipping
files in Git is not hopeless.
Short answer is no.
On the mac, by default, git does not track resource forks, or xattrs or finder info.
git
will "slice" your resource forks right off, which is exactly what I wanted.
Other tools, like cp
and rsync
have been patched on the mac to preserve
this metadata, which at times is convenient and at other times annoying.
git
is not yet annoying. Or convenient, depending on your POV.