Jim Meyering wrote: > I've always taken the stand that > generated files should be read-only, and this is just another > reason to follow that policy.
I'm vehemently opposed to such a change. On the contrary, I think the policy should be that in a distrib tarball, _all_ files and directories should be writable. The reasons are: 1) For the user who unpacks and builds a package. When he wants to remove the package, he will do "rm -r coreutils-6.2". This will start asking questions. So he types Ctrl-C, and does "rm -rf coreutils-6.2". And next time he will possibly use "rm -rf" to avoid the problem. But "rm -rf" removes anything, without safety measures. If he makes a typo, he is hosed! So by declaring some files read-only, you are degrading the safety of users because they get accustomed to "rm -rf". In other words, IMO, the read-only status should be reserved to precious files. 2) For the user who needs to fix a compilation problem, or do minor developments in a package. In this case I _do_ want to change the Makefile or config.h, to see the results. Because if I change Makefile.am or *.m4, I will have to wait 5 minutes until aclocal, automake, autoheader, configure have completed their business. Or even worse, I will get errors because I don't have the "right" automake and autoconf versions installed. When I modify a Makefile and, when trying to save it, am told that I cannot save it, it's a major annoyance. Furthermore, people who have not yet understood the complete machinery don't know which file to modify to get a certain modification. Sometimes I get fix suggestions from people who hand-modified the 'configure' file or so. If they are not able to do so, because 'configure' is read-only, they will likely not send anything useful, maybe no bug report at all. > Note that this does affect modules/* files owned by others. > If anyone objects, I'll quickly revert the objectionable change. Please revert. It is not acceptable for me to have read-only files in a gettext or libiconv distribution. > Bruno, would you mind if I changed the uses of "t-$@" to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" > in modules/localcharset? Yes. The rule would not work right any more on 8+3 filesystems (DJGPP, possibly also OS/2). Bruno
