Re: New repo quickly corrupted

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

Almost all programs like that will entirely ignor the fact that something is read-only.

Why? Becuase you end up having to create a new file *anyway*. So nobody does modify-in-place, they literally end up doing

 - create temp-file
 - while (data) 
	read old file, write to tempfile
 - rename temp-file over oldfile

and unless you *explicitly* look at the permission bits you'll never even notice that the old file was read-only, because none of the steps above care at all!

So marking things read-only will give only limited protection. It will protect against most editors, and will protect against things that change files in-place and literally try to open the original file as read-write, but not much else.

			Linus