Subject: bug#10878: "make dist" with read-only srcdir generates read-only tarball

From: Nick Bowler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:26:04 -0500

On 2012-02-24 09:12 -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 02/24/2012 08:09 AM, Nick Bowler wrote:
[...]
> > Automake should at least add user write permissions to all files in
> > distdir prior to running dist-hook (and hence prior to generating the
> > distribution tarball).
> 
> Automake must not add write permissions to files that were intended to
> be shipped as read-only.  For example, coreutils intentionally converts
> generated-but-distributed files to read-only, so that users are more
> likely to notice that they should edit the source that generates the
> file, and not the generated file itself.

This sounds to me like a weird special case.  Coreutils would still work
correctly if the files were writable (otherwise it wouldn't build at all
on some filesystems).  Generated files should also have a statement to
that effect in them, if at all possible.

Regardless, I think it's a bad idea and frustrating for users to have
any read-only files in a source tarball at all.

> So how do you propose to tell automake which files are supposed to be
> read-only, vs. those that should be writable even if the tarball was
> re-created from a read-only srcdir?

With my above proposed solution, the way to do this would be to use a
dist-hook to remove the write permissions from the relevant files at
"make dist" time.

Cheers,
-- 
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)