Re: Automake 1.4l released

["Tim Van Holder" <tim dot van dot holder at pandora dot be>]

> But I'm not talking about FAT or VFAT.  I'm talking about NTFS, a whole
> different beast.  IMNSHO, the linux and dos behaviors you describe ARE
> the mistake, and cygwin's behavior (on NTFS) is correct -- why should
> you be allowed to change the file metadata (timestamp, etc) if you don't
> have write access to the file?

Don't know - but since the majority of systems allow it, I assume there
is a good reason.  For example, it makes perfect sense to change, say, the
archive bit for a read-only file on DOS (to mark it for backup).
Similarly, I see nothing wrong with chown'ing or chmod'ing a read-only
file.  So why would the timestamp be handled differently from other file
metadata?  In all the cases, the file itself is not written to, which
satisfies the read-only constraint implied by the file's attributes.
So IMHO, cygwin should recognize the "unusual" behaviour of NTFS, and
perhaps internally do 'chmod +w; touch; chmod -w' when changing the
timestamp of a read-only file.