Comment 19 for bug 67589

Changing how inventories are stored, or adding another store for extra information requires a format bump and is something that only newer clients will be able to understand. (They have to look at one *more* location to find what they need.)

Adding a special file to the tree such as ".fileproperties" is just another versioned file. Some clients may or may not understand it, but all of them would transmit it and preserve it.

Arguably that is a good or bad thing. Failing to apply the properties could lead to a security hole (accidentally allowing your private key to be world-readable, for example.)

We have discussed allowing arbitrary per-file key-value dictionaries. Robert has genuine concern that it is a way to get yourself into trouble. Once you start having generic access to critical values, you start running into problems maintaining invariants. (Someone can poke in a new value for svn:eol without updating the file, for example.)