Re: Automake 1.4l released

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Wilson <cwilson@ece.gatech.edu> writes:

I've read this whole thread

Charles> That's why I advocate the change: what if other filesystems
Charles> behave "correctly" (my definition).  In addition, what is the
Charles> rationale for doing 'chmod -R a-w' in the distdir: rule,
Charles> anyway?  Isn't 'chmod -R go-w' just as "good" a choice?

As I recall, the `a-w' change was introduced so that `distcheck' would
ensure that building from read-only sources would work.  For instance
this lets us check that there isn't a bug in a Makefile.am causing a
write to srcdir.

I think this is a useful check.  It tests for an actual bug which
people can easily introduce by mistake.  Using `go-w' would
effectively remove this test.  So by default I would prefer to keep
this if possible.

Charles> The 'cp -p' command performs the copy in a two step process:
Charles> first, the file is copied, permissions and all. So, we have a
Charles> new copy of the file which is ALSO -r--r--r--, but with the
Charles> wrong timestamp.

Interesting.

The reason we want `cp -p' is that preserving timestamps is very
important to making a correct distribution.  If the timestamps are
wrong, then, say, configure.in might be newer than configure -- this
would be very bad.


Note that people using automake as maintainers on Cygwin is a pretty
new phenomenon.  I've never heard of anybody trying to run `make dist'
on Cygwin before.  This failure isn't a plot against Cygwin or
anything like that; I think it is just new territory.


In this particular case I guess I would argue that we're seeing either
a bug in cp or a Cygwin bug.

On Linux and Solaris I can use utime() to change the mtime and the
atime of a file even though it is `a-w'.  That argues for a Cygwin
kernel bug.  I haven't reported a Cygwin bug in a long, long time.
Would you care to do it?  Otherwise I will investigate the procedure.

Tom