Re: Make executable scripts executable

[Marco Franzen <Marco dot Franzen at Thyron dot com>]

Thanks for CCing this to me, Bruce.

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Bruce Korb wrote:
> Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> >   > This would add "chmod a+x" functionality to the touch
> >   > function.  OK to apply?
> > It shouldn't be necessary.  I thought CVS was supposed to preserve
> > permissions -- in which case the right fix is to identify the files
> > and have someone chmod +x them in the CVS repo itself.

This feature of CVS is (even on platforms where it actually works) not
complete. Like most meta-information about files (as opposed to contents), It
stores permissions only once per RCS ("history") file. You cannot have different
permissions for different versions/branches/etc, and changes to them are not
logged or leave any other trace.

`chmod +x'ing them won't hurt, but relying on this would mean running an
unnecessary risk, especially if there is an easy alternative.

> Yep, it shouldn't be necessary:
> 
> Marco Franzen wrote:
[about my dos/cvs failure]
> but it shouldn't hurt, either.

To be honest, if I had known that the snapshots are available as ready-made
tarballs via anonymous ftp (as I found out only today), I would have
downloaded these. I would not have remembered WhimDoze's cr/nl nonsense,
but I would have done it in the hope that correct timestamps would save me
installing autoconf/gperf/etc or fakes for them. As a side-effect, it would not
have triggered either of my finincludes bugs that you helped me with (neither
distclean nor permissions).

But you would not have had the opportunity to fix them either.  ;-)

In fact, any help to get things working in an imperfect work (where there are
still diseases like MS) saves some people some time or prevents them from being
put off. If the fix is clean and easy and does not hurt, then why not? If
nothing else, it could avoid some bug reports (like mine) and free developers'
time (like Bruce's).

Cheers,

-- Marco
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