Executable flagging patch

[george young]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:14:22 -0500
John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> threw this fish to the penguins:

> george young wrote:
> 
> >
> > I strongly believe that a rcs should leave the permissions bits
> > however the user set them.  It may not *usually* be useful or
> > appropriate for 'other' to have x but not r, but I really don't think
> > bzr should be making decisions about what permissions ought to be.
> > Just do your best to maintain what the user set, and that will be
> > fine.
> > [my appolgies if I have misunderstood the substance of this discussion...]
> >
> 
> The question is *which* X bit do you check? Any of them? If any, then do
> you set all of them?
> Do you track them each individually?

Bzr should preserve permissions bits just as slavishly as "tar".  Ok,
if a file lacks owner+r or a directory lacks owner+rwx, this prevents
bzr from doing it's job, so we can just punt with a rude error
message.  Otherwise, it should maintain permissions just as they are.
(I believe tla(gnu-arch) does this [it even seems to have some code
for preserving setuid, setgid, etc.])

I'm not saying this should be an urgent priority, but surely it should
be a goal.  I hate to think of a prospective user getting all set to
use this nifty new rcs and then find that it's dropping data about his
files.

-- George



> I think my preference is to check for the User bit, and set all of them,
> according to the umask. Either that, or check for Any, and again, set
> according to umask.
> 
> And to not check for Directories. Since they should always be X bit anyway.
> 
> As far as ChangeExecuteBit, I think it should be a separate class. When
> we implement tracking the full permissions, then we can switch to
> ChangeUnixPermissions (and not have an individual Change object for each
> bit).
> But what we are doing with the executable bit is pretty different from
> what we would do with tracking all bits. (I have a feeling they will be
> in fairly different code paths at that point).
> 
> John
> =:->
> 


-- 
"Are the gods not just?"  "Oh no, child.
What would become of us if they were?" (CSL)