Re: Use of chmod in gnulib

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 3:18 PM Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 3/22/20 10:17 AM, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>
> > According to the Autoconf manual, commands like 'chmod +x' should be
> > avoided in favor of 'chmod a+x'. I believe the same applies to 'chmod
> > -w' and friends. Also see
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Limitations-of-Usual-Tools.html.
> >
> > It looks like there are some of the earlier in the gnulib sources:
>
> Those uses look safe to me. Either they're 'chmod +a' which is a macOS 
> extension
> and so the Autoconf advice doesn't apply, or they're 'chmod +x' on a newly
> created file which is safe unless someone has a purposely-harmful and
> unsupported umask like 0777 which will break 'configure' in countless other 
> ways.

If that's true, then it sounds like the manual is wrong and the manual
should be updated.

Jeff