Linux – Convert an ext4 partition to ext3 without formatting the HDD

I solved the problem. It was because mkinitrd was called without --with=ext4 option. I posted detailed article to my blog.

The general answer is "no". uid and gid on the filesystem will be as set at the moment of the write and if they don't match on a different machine, then privileges won't match either.

If you do not want to make a small revolution with uids/gids on several machines, you could try using acls to set the desired permissions for all desired users on all machines. I suspect this will use numerical uids internally, so it could happen, that giving access to your account foo on machine A, uid a, will give access to your files to a random guy bar on machine B, uid a. It also seems like it's more hassle than it's worth.

I think that saner approach would be to use tar to migrate your development tree.

I have also had a half-baked idea of carrying around a Subversion repository (with files writable only to root and appropriate access configuration files), and relying on svn server being present on all machines which you are going to use, but I do not think it's excessively sane.