Bruno Haible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
A further rant on that theme: I've been annoyed more than once that automake 'distcheck' chmod parts of the FOOPKG-x.y.z/ directory as read-only. Further, it even chmod directories as read-only as well, so that not even 'rm -rf' works! [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/src/libidn$ make distcheck ... ^C [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/src/libidn$ rm -rf libidn-0.6.6 rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/doxygen/Doxyfile.in': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/doxygen/Doxyfile.orig': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/doxygen/gdoc2doxygen': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/idn-python/README': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/idn-python/Makefile': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/idn-python/idn.c': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/idn-python/test.py': Permission denied rm: cannot remove `libidn-0.6.6/contrib/java/README': Permission denied That is time-consuming to restore; I usually do 'sudo rm -rf libidn-0.6.6', which is an even worse habit than 'rm -rf'... Sigh. /Simon
