On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 09:04:24 -0600, Aleksey Gurtovoy <agurtovoy@meta-comm.com> wrote:
Vladimir Prus writes:
No unix source package I ever downloaded had read-only files.
Could our long-time unix users confirm/negate this experience?
I concur with Vladimir. Files in a distribution tarball should be created writeable by the owner (e.g. octal mode 644 for files, 755 for directories). I have encountered a handful of distributions which do not behave this way and have immediately done a "chmod -R +w <dir>" on each, as I did with this one.
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.
Its the "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" argument. Don't do that then. But let ME do it if I want to. Its a free world.
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.
Well, I for one unpacked the .tar.gz version of the distribution on my PC (using cygwin tar) and tried to build with Visual Studio .NET 2003. The build of bjam failed because the compiler couldn't write its .pdb files in the write-protected directories. I suspect I would have run into similar build problems on the UNIX side if I hadn't chmodded the entire directory tree first (and if I didn't already have a pre-builld bjam executable there). Please make the files and directories in the tarballs writeable. It makes sense to *install* the headers and libraries non-writeable as part of the "bjam install" step, but having the sources write-protected is just a pain in the neck. -- Caleb Epstein caleb.epstein@gmail.com