Re: [Gnu-arch-users] BUG: feature request: 'tla chmod' which 'touch'es files

[Aaron Bentley]

John Meinel wrote:
> Aaron Bentley wrote:
>
> > Zenaan Harkness wrote:

> > I'd rather fix revlibs so permission changes are detected, instead.

> Well, fixing revlibs to detect the change is certainly important. But I 
> was thinking that if you accidentally used an editor that didn't break 
> hardlinks, then you would at least have a readonly file so you would 
> realize you shouldn't edit it, or at least should break the hardlink first.

Seems some people are interested in that.  Fine by me if they can figure 
out a sane way to do that.  But fixing inode-sigs should have a higher 
priority.

> Is there a specific reason why permission changes are not detected?

Not really.  It's planned, but we want to do it carefully, so that old 
signatures still work, and only new ones store the permission data.

> Is 
> it just that timestamps are checked first, and if they are the same, no 
> further work is done?

The signature is checked first-- it includes inode, mtime, size

> So is it just the matter of checking permissions as well as checking 
> timestamp?

It's a matter of adding permissions to the signature.

> Also, if checking timestamp, which one are you checking? As I recall, 
> mtime is the last modification to the file, but ctime is the last update 
> of permissions. 

We use mtime.  Unfortunately, ctime is modified by operations we wish to 
ignore, like adding hard-links.

Aaron