Re: Automake 1.4l released

[Earnie Boyd]

> Subject: RE: Automake 1.4l released
> Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:13:48 +0200
> From: Bernard Dautrevaux <address@hidden>
> To: 'Tim Van Holder' <address@hidden>, Charles Wilson
>      <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, "'address@hidden'" <address@hidden>
> 
-8<-
> 
> > my point was
> > merely that I consider the cygwin/NTFS behaviour unusual, as a file's
> > readonly attribute generally applies to the file, not the metadata
> > kept by the file system for that file.
> 
> I should agree here; ANY case where cygwin is different from traditional
> UNIX practice is disturbing.
> 

Your points are invalid in that this isn't a Cygwin behavior except
through inheritance of the way the OS and file system works.  The point
of all of the autotools is to provide for practical portability.  When
you release a version that breaks that portability then it is a bug in
the release.  Autoconf had to bend over backward to keep current
functionality for portability reasons.  Automake is a sister tool to
Autoconf and should maintain the same effort to maintain portability.

The native shell when using NTFS will exhibit this behavior as well. 
For this reason alone, please, consider Chuck's work around to this
problem.  For other reasons, you are causing a HOALOW for little gain on
the tool side.  The gain for Automake is what, "To test the distribution
for CDROM release"?  At least test to see if `touch'ing a read only file
will cause problems and work around them automagically if it does.

Earnie.

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