writability of directories in distributions

[Harlan Stenn]

I just saw a patch go by about changing the perms on directories in
distribution tarballs.

I'm a fan of 775 myself (ok, I really prefer 2775).

But I can see that some would prefer 777, and others would prefer 755.

The other issue, as I recall, has to do with whether or not 'root' is
doing the unpacking.

While there is something to be said for letting the package maintainer
make this choice, there is also clearly something to be said for letting
the recipient make the choice.

I suspect that leaving the current behavior alone will irritate some,
and changing the current behavior will irritate others.

We can only go so far with "solving" this problem at distribution time.

I'm not ready to suggest we have a DIST_DIRMODE value, as I'm not sure
how useful it would be.

Likewise, I'm not sure we should have a pkg_dirmodes script that gets
bundled with the tarballs that folks could run to set the directory
perms the way they want them.  Specifically on this point, should we
limit the effects of this script to directory modes, or should it
adjust file perms as well?

To the extent my vote counts for anything, my preference would be to
discuss this issue (my preference would be a wiki page, as I hate
sniffing thru email discussions) and make changes after we have a wide
enough and deep enough understanding of the issues.
-- 
Harlan Stenn <address@hidden>
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