bug#40699: "dist Hook" documentation in manual is incorrect or unclear about write permissions

[Nick Bowler]

On 18/04/2020, Vincent Lefevre <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2020-04-18 15:04:08 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
[...]
>> Also, not that I wrote any of this, but it seems to me that the
>> pervasive assumption is that the automake user in fact owns the file
>> trees in question. Thus rm -rf should work even if it's mode zero.
>
> No, it doesn't. At least not with
>
>   rm (GNU coreutils) 8.30
>
> i.e. it does not change the permissions in order to make the removal
> work recursively (the -f just means that it ignores nonexistent files
> and that it will never prompt for confirmation).
>
>> Of course it won't work on a read-only source tree, but, well, it's just
>> an example ... --thanks, karl.
>
> It's just an example, but it should be correct (at least if there are
> no warnings about things that have been dropped to make it simpler).
> A user may want to copy-paste this example, and he will get something
> incorrect.

I guess the note about dist-hooks when packaging from a read-only srcdir
was added because of my bug report[1].

I have never noticed read-only _directories_ in the distdir before (I
have assumed they are always created read-write so that Automake can
put distributed files in them) but I also don't ever put directory
names in EXTRA_DIST which is the case specifically called out in the
documentation.

I think it's kind of weird that distribution permissions can depend on
how the package tarball was unpacked so since then I always use
dist-hook to fix up permissions in $(distdir) before anything else.

[1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10878

Cheers,
  Nick