bug#12632: file permissions checking mishandled when setuid

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/19/2012 07:25 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> that must have been rather prescient on his part.

Ha!  I should have known there was something odd about
an Emacs bug report dated 1983.

For what it's worth, I have verified that the bug
exists in the oldest version of GNU Emacs that I found
at gnu.org, namely GNU Emacs 18.59 (dated October 1992).
I suspect that the bug goes back to the first version
of GNU Emacs, though.  At least, I hope so: it's not
often that one gets to fix a bug that old.

> maybe he was using some other Emacs version.

Torek's Usenet posting (Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.858,
Posted: Fri Apr  8 14:18:56 1983) doesn't say which Emacs
he was writing about.  Most likely it was Gosling's Emacs;
this was back when that was freely redistributable.

It's not surprising that Gosling Emacs (assuming that's what
it was) had the same bug then that GNU Emacs does now.  It's
a common bug associated with the use of the 'access' system call.