Comment by paulddraper
15 days ago
> I wouldn't expect this to be something that transfers between machines
Maybe non-UNIX machines I suppose.
But I 100% need executable files to be executable.
15 days ago
> I wouldn't expect this to be something that transfers between machines
Maybe non-UNIX machines I suppose.
But I 100% need executable files to be executable.
This seems like something that shouldn't be the container formats responsibility. You can record arbitrary metadata and put it in a file in the container, so it's trivial to layer on top.
On the other hand, tie the container structure to your OS metadata structure, and your (hopefully good) container format is now stuck with portability issues between other OSes that don't have the same metadata layout, as well as your own OS in the past & future.
What is a container then?
Just an id,blob format?
The purpose of tar (or competitors) is to serialize files and their metadata.
Tar is not the pinnacle of "containers"; it has age and ubiquity, and that's about it at this point.
Tar's purpose was to serialise files and metadata in 1979, accounting for tape foibles such as fixed or variable data block size.
Honestly, sometimes I just want to mark all files on a Linux system as executable and see what would even break and why. Seriously, why is there a whole bit for something that's essentially an 'read permission, but you can also directly execute it from the shell'?
It’s a security thing, in conjunction with sudoers, I think.
From the days when UNIX was primarily multiuser/timeshare. You can prevent users from running wacky stuff with the umask.
No you can't. If a user can read something, it can execute it. The only thing where it matters is setuid applications where the setuid bit allows the user to run an application as someone else. But it's already a separate permission bit, and frankly, the whole setuid idea turned out to be quite a high-maintenance design in the end, with lots of additional features heaped on top of it to help mitigate the worst vulnerabilities.
Do you also want the setuid bit I added?