369287 - a few thousand files in repository have unnecessary execute permissions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org :: CVS: Administration, task, P3)

Description

[Ray Kiddy]

This is not a huge problem, but it is something that is very easily prevented and can be a source of security problems. And it looks sloppy.

Checking out various products from the CVS repository gives you about 20000-ish files that have execute permissions. They end in ".js", ".cpp", ".h", ".png", and so on.

I can generate the list and attach it if desired, but lots of people can write the 2 line shell script to generate it.

Comment 1

[Ray Kiddy]

FYI, this is on an intel mac with 10.4.8.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This is a side effect of people committing from Windows boxes, which have no concept of file permissions.  I think it's a lost cause to try to fix it, because they'll just come back.  But I'm just guessing wildly, the build guys might know better.

Comment 3

[Ray Kiddy]

I would agree, except that on the one hand, a nightly script could fix it, or at least make it so that the files do not stay in this condition.

Also, assuming we are moving to version control system that allows pre-commit hooks, this is a minor thing that can be done in a pr-commit hook.

Comment 4

[Justin Fitzhugh]

Re-assigning to build for a repo decision...

Comment 5

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

Assigning priority. Needs more investigation, look into CVSMASK.

Comment 6

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This is a side effect of people committing from Windows boxes, which have no
> concept of file permissions.  I think it's a lost cause to try to fix it,
> because they'll just come back.  But I'm just guessing wildly, the build guys
> might know better.

I agree, unless it's causing a problem (or we can reasonably anticipate one) we should WONTFIX. Should not be a security concern for the final bits, they can be corrected during packaging.

It does look sloppy, but this is not a problem for other version control systems, it's yet another quirk of CVS and I don't think we should invest time in fixing this and keeping it fixed.