[Rd] File permissions test during R CMD check

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Kurt Hornik wrote:

> >>>>> "David Kane writes:
>
> > I think that I understand why R CMD check should warn if the
> > permissions on a file are too restrictive, but I don't understand why
> > it should warn if they are "too" loose. On UNIX, why is a file with
> > 644 OK, but one with 664 (just adding group writability) problematic
> > enough to require a warning?
>
> I think we want the *installed* files to be 644 and dirs to be 755 (by
> default).  Can we be sure that all routes to installing a package (as
> source or binary) lead to this even if permissions originally were too
> loose?  I don't, hence I prefer being on the defensive side.

There is an assumption that

umask 022

in INSTALL (on Unix-alikes) actually works.  If so, installing from source
should work.  You can't be sure about binary packages: they might not be
installed by INSTALL.

I don't see this.  We do not insist that R itself is installed as
world-readable, and I don't see why we should be doing so for packages.
Further, it would be convenient to have installed packages
group-writeable, as then anyone in the group can run update.packages().

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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