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Postings from May 2008
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Abigail <abigail@abigail.be> wrote: > > The following patch to File::Copy makes if one copies a file, permission > bits are handled as POSIX 1003.1 describes the shell utility 'cp' ought > to behave. Belatedly following up on this. If the rationale is that Perl should act as much as possible like a native utility, then this clearly is the right thing to do. If, on the other hand, Perl should have its own definition of the right thing to do and act the same on all platforms, then this actually widens the gap between platforms. I don't have any strong objection to your change, but I just want you to be aware you are shifting us from the latter to the former (after umpteen years of the latter). > A few points: > > * The patch is probably incomplete. Non-Unix systems may need some > special handling, depending on what '(stat $fh) [2]' returns. > I neither have knowledge of, nor access to any non-Unix systems > to develop this myself. > > * This patch introduces a non-backwards compatible change. Some code > somewhere is probably relying on the fact the permission bits of > the new file have no relation to the file copied from. On VMS, and I believe also on Win32 (which closely mimics the VMS file protection scheme), the absence of a relationship between the source file permissions and the target file permissions is by design. The specifics can get rather complicated, but the gist of it is that a copy of a file is a new file that is expected to play nice in its new environment, where "environment" may include previous versions of the same file, process defaults, directory defaults, ACLs, etc. Native utilities can override this behavior (COPY/PROTECTION on VMS, XCOPY /O on Windows), but it's something you have to ask for explicitly. > * The new tests may not work on all non-Unix systems. I'd say they are unlikely to work at all on any non-Unix system. I've checked in change #33916 to skip them on VMS. Last I saw they were all failing in the Win32 smokes and they will probably have to be skipped there as well.Thread Previous | Thread Next