Re: Automake 1.4l released

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Wilson <address@hidden> writes:

Charles> Nope.  It actually seems to be due to a change in automake.
Charles> Apparently, make distcheck did not previously 'chmod -R a-w'.

I looked a bit but due to massive reorganization it is a pain to find
out when this went in.


We rely on `cp -p' in a few places, all in `dist'.  The problem is
most obvious in `distcheck' because it makes the tree read-only when
it is unpacked.  But suppose you use something like CVSREAD and check
out a tree.  Then a file like configure could very well be read-only,
leading to the same problem for a simple `dist'.

I think we could add a check for whether "cp -p works in ." to
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE and then use the result everywhere.  For this to work
we'd also need to add code to `missing' to handle this case, I think
(code I'm not entirely sure how to write -- ideally it would restore
the original file's permissions once it was done with the copy).

I think our goal should be to support this feature everywhere.  But if
there aren't maintainers who need this in 1.5, I would prefer to file
a PR and leave it until a later release.  If you are such a
maintainer, please speak up.  Charles, are you?

Tom