On 18/04/2020, Vincent Lefevre <vinc...@vinc17.net> wrote: > On 2020-04-18 15:04:08 -0600, Karl Berry wrote: [...] >> Also, not that I wrote any of this, but it seems to me that the >> pervasive assumption is that the automake user in fact owns the file >> trees in question. Thus rm -rf should work even if it's mode zero. > > No, it doesn't. At least not with > > rm (GNU coreutils) 8.30 > > i.e. it does not change the permissions in order to make the removal > work recursively (the -f just means that it ignores nonexistent files > and that it will never prompt for confirmation). > >> Of course it won't work on a read-only source tree, but, well, it's just >> an example ... --thanks, karl. > > It's just an example, but it should be correct (at least if there are > no warnings about things that have been dropped to make it simpler). > A user may want to copy-paste this example, and he will get something > incorrect.
I guess the note about dist-hooks when packaging from a read-only srcdir was added because of my bug report[1]. I have never noticed read-only _directories_ in the distdir before (I have assumed they are always created read-write so that Automake can put distributed files in them) but I also don't ever put directory names in EXTRA_DIST which is the case specifically called out in the documentation. I think it's kind of weird that distribution permissions can depend on how the package tarball was unpacked so since then I always use dist-hook to fix up permissions in $(distdir) before anything else. [1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10878 Cheers, Nick