Calibrating permissions

[j2mcgreg]

@Jakob77 wrote:

I understand the Thunderbird developers has to be careful with what they do for a skilled user like you.
But if they want to supply my demand they also have to think about how they up to some degree can make Thunderbird foolproof.

What's their incentive to do so? To them, you are just one drone in an ever changing vast hive of user bees. They charge us user bees nothing for their product and we are free to tinker with it as we wish.

[CharlesV]

Which is precisely as it should be!

The fact that YOU dont understand it does not mean that it is wrong - it means ... you dont understand it!

if you copy files to a new location unless you copy the files permissions with that copy, those files are deemed to be NEW in the folder you copy them to, and are placed under the existing folders permissions. This IS how it is done! ( linux 101 )

cp
vs
cp -p

[DukeComposed]

Which is precisely as it should be!

The fact that YOU dont understand it does not mean that it is wrong - it means ... you dont understand it!

if you copy files to a new location unless you copy the files permissions with that copy, those files are deemed to be NEW in the folder you copy them to, and are placed under the existing folders permissions. This IS how it is done! ( linux 101 )

We're now at 7 pages -- and counting -- of a thread that boils down to "I copied Linux files to a Windows file system and it lost the original permissions, let's make this Thunderbird's fault".

Beyond using "cp -p" to preserve file permissions, there's "tar -cp" for creating archive files that do the same thing. And there's mtree for creating spec files to compare and repair arbitrary file permissions. (The mtree-netbsd package is not installed by default in MX Linux, which is a shame.) These are all basic system administration tools. They come with comprehensive man pages and there are hundreds if not thousands of tutorials for their usage online. They are, as you point out, "Linux 101". Everybody has at some point accidentally run rm -rf on the wrong directory. Everybody has pooched their file permissions at some point. Most people have rendered their system unbootable somehow and had to reinstall.

These are not bugs. These are just a part of learning. One can litigate how Thunderbird is at fault for a simple mistake that was made in ignorance forever, but it will not fix the simple fact that understanding these systems, how they work and interact, will be far more useful than posting on forums like this one how one free program needs to spend its developer resources making it resistant to your whoopsie-daisies.

[CharlesV]

@DukeComposed Well said... and with that - locking the topic.