On 02/24/2012 11:34 AM, Nick Bowler wrote: >> But it's the package that expects its distributed files to be writable >> that is assuming too much; if such package wants its expectation to >> safely hold, it should add something like this in its 'dist-hook': >> >> find $(distdir) -exec chmod u+w '{}' ';'
I agree. > > I'm not talking about building the package, which absolutely should work > from a read-only source tree. I'm talking about creating a distribution > tarball, with "make dist": something only package maintainers (that's > me!) will generally do. That's where we are arguing that you are wrong. The GNU Coding Standards requires that _anyone_ can run 'make dist', and not just 'package maintainers'. That's the whole point of software freedom: You, as a recipient of the tarball, should be just as free to redistribute your modifications (including rebuilding a tarball) as the upstream maintainer you got the package from, even if you are starting from your (possibly read-only) copy of the expanded tarball. Which is _why_ 'make distcheck' intentionally checks that 'make dist' from a read-only source tarball will accurately create a tarball. This is a _feature_ of automake's 'make distcheck'. If you want to guarantee that the generated tarball has certain permissions, then you, as the package author, must add something in your dist-hook to guarantee it, since automake cannot know which files you _need_ to leave writable. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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