Vladimir Prus writes:
Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
The first two archives does not give write permissions to the user (for the unarchived files).
That's intentional. After all, normally you shouldn't be modifying anything in the distribution. Or should you?
No unix source package I ever downloaded had read-only files.
Could our long-time unix users confirm/negate this experience?
That gives no protection, really.
It prevents you from accidental editing/deletion.
If I unintentionally remove some files, I can just reinstall.
I'd rather be saved from that.
If I want to edit them, I'll edit them anyway.
Sure, if you know what you are doing. You are not supposed to be doing that, though, so that fact that you have to apply an extra effort here shouldn't matter. IOW, the point is that there are hardly any use cases for editing the files that came from the tarball that favor "easiness of editing", and there is a number of use cases in support of read-only status.
Write protection will just get in the way. BTW, just like it gets in the way with Boost CVS -- somehow all files are read only and I constantly have to change permissions or tell Emacs to override them.
Completely unlike it, IMO. In the above situation, it's a CVS checkout, you are a developer, and editing is a normal workflow. Everything is exactly the opposite with the tarball. -- Aleksey Gurtovoy MetaCommunications Engineering