Someone recently opened trac ticket #10813 (https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/10813) with the description:

I recently updated Boost 1.57, I noticed that a few header files "parameter.hpp" and some of those in the "parameter" directory has permission 755 instead of normal 644. Why make these normal header files executable?

Since I built the release tarballs, I took this ticket and did some investigating. The OP is absolutely correct, these files should not have 755 perms. Unfortunately for me, I discovered: 1) These permissions were not modified during the build process, but are marked this way in git. 2) It’s not just the parameter library. I found about 1000 files marked as executable that shouldn’t be, and they were in the following libraries: asio assign bimap chrono concept_check foreach fusion gil graph iostreams lambda mpl msm numeric parameter polygon predef ptr_container python test thread type_traits typeof variant xpressive Some files (such as shell scripts, python sources, etc) *should* be marked executable, but others (.hpp files, jam files, HTML, png, etc) should not. I will deal with the libraries that are currently under the purview of the CMT (concept_check and mpl) I would appreciate if the maintainers of these libraries would clean this up before the Feb release. Also, I will be enhancing the “inspect” tool to report on these this week. — Marshall