[m-dev.] For review: Simplified installation of user libraries

[Fergus Henderson]

On 04-Oct-1999, Warwick Harvey <wharvey at cs.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> Well, there was a snag during a test of the bindist stuff.  vpath_find was 
> missing.  It seems there's a couple of other files missing too (info_to_mdb, 
> sicstus_conv --- though I daresay you don't care about the latter any more?).

Right.

> While investigating this, I came up with a couple more questions.  What's 
> the difference between UTILS and SCRIPT_FILES? The obvious thing to me 
> would be that the former refers to files in the util subdirectory (compiled 
> binaries) whereas the latter refers to files in the scripts subdirectory 
> (architecture independent).  But there are a number of files from the 
> scripts subdirectory mentioned in the UTILS variable.

The difference is that SCRIPT_FILES are named *.in and need to get
processed by autoconf, in case the bindist is installed with a different
`--prefix', whereas UTILS can just be copied directly.

Yes, the names are misleading; originally everything in the scripts
directory was named *.in...  if you want to change them, I'd be happy.

> Now, the two are 
> installed slightly differently: those in UTILS are just copied into place, 
> while those in INSTALL_SCRIPTS have `chmod +w' run on them (the "normal" 
> installation process [not bindist] also does a `chmod u+w' on installed 
> scripts --- but everything from the scripts dir).  Why the difference(s), 
> and why `+w'?
>
> My guess is UTILS should be for util/* and *SCRIPTS* should be for 
> scripts/*, and am happy to fix this.  But I don't understand the `+w'.  Is 
> it meant to be `+x'?  Or am I missing something here?

That is a bug.  It should be `u+w'.
That bug was fixed for scripts/Mmake -- see the log message below --
but unfortunately I forgot to fix it for bindist/bindist.Makefile.in.

 | Fix a security problem with the use of `chmod +w'.
 | 
 | {scripts,runtime}/Mmake:
 |         Use `chmod u+w' rather than `chmod +w' on the installed files,
 |         since `chmod +w' has the wrong effect with some versions of chmod.
 |         When configure creates automatically-generated files, we do a
 |         `chmod -w' on them to make sure that you don't accidentally edit
 |         the automatically-generated file rather than the source `.in' file.
 |         However, if the installed copies are write-only, then it causes
 |         problems when installing a new copy on top of an old one.
 |         Hence we turn write permission back on again on the installed copies.
 |         The `chmod +w' command has the right effect on Solaris, OSF/1, and
 |         SunOS, where it takes into account the umask.  However, on IRIX and
 |         ULTRIX, `chmod +w' does not take the umask into account, and so
 |         makes the files world-writable, which is a security problem.
 |         Hence, we now use `chmod u+w' instead.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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