Safari bookmarks, git repositories, and automatic updating

I recently added ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist to my homedir git repository in the misguided hope that it would be a magically sensible way to keep my bookmarks sync’d between my various systems. This evening was the first real test:

Kay:~ janderson$ pgit pull
/Users/janderson
remote: Counting objects: 9, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 5 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (5/5), done.
From ssh://slice1.civilfritz.net/home/janderson/git/home
   9d1b3c1..5fdae45  master     -> origin/master
Updating 9d1b3c1..5fdae45
Fast-forward
 Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist |  Bin 1951 -> 2498 bytes
 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
/Users/janderson/org
Already up-to-date.

Not only did the day’s changes propagate to my local system, but Safari implemented the change immediately, in the current running process, in the current window, without intervention. I’m sure this has something to do with fsevents, but it’s just one more example of the extent of behavior you can get away with if you implement a system properly in the first place. (After all: it’s not as though Apple had this use case in mind.)

Of course, the true test will be how well the file format copes with an n-way merge… but I’ll cross that bridge when git blows up in my face.