Re: Problem with git and file mode changes

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 9/4/2015 11:12 AM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 04:44:11PM +0200, Dani Moncayo wrote:
>> After doing a 'git pull', I saw that git didn't make the merge,
>> because apparently I had some local changes.  But I didn't make
>> any local change.  For example, this file appears as modified:
>>
>>    $ git status --short test/rmailmm.el
>>     M test/rmailmm.el
>>
>>    $ git diff test/rmailmm.el
>>    diff --git a/test/rmailmm.el b/test/rmailmm.el
>>    old mode 100644
>>    new mode 100755
>>
>> Mmm strange, I never changed the permissions of any file in my
>> repo.  And moreover:
>>
>>    $ ls -o test/rmailmm.el
>>    -rwxrwxr--+ 1 Dani 3106 Sep 4 16:19 test/rmailmm.el
>>
>> According to 'ls', the file mode is 774, but according to git is
>> 755.  Which one is wrong?
>
> Git internally only stores file permissions of 755 or 644*; anything
> else is mapped down to one of those two, based (I believe) on whether
> the user execute bit is set or not.
>
>> Well, let's try to revert the misterious change:
>>
>>    $ git checkout test/rmailmm.el
>>
>>    $ git status --short test/rmailmm.el
>>     M test/rmailmm.el
>>
>>    $ git diff test/rmailmm.el
>>    diff --git a/test/rmailmm.el b/test/rmailmm.el
>>    old mode 100644
>>    new mode 100755
>>
>>    $ ls -o test/rmailmm.el
>>    -rwxrwxr--+ 1 Dani 3106 Sep  4 16:28 test/rmailmm.el
>>
>> Apparently nothing has changed after the 'git checkout'!!
>
> It looks like the underlying file system is failing to record the file
> permissions correctly**.  That could be a limitation of the file system
> (FAT32 is much more limited than NTFS, for example, and I could believe
> permissions go very wrong over network shares), of the options with
> which the filesystem is mounted in Cygwin (take a look for "noacl" in
> the Cygwin FAQs), or possibly just that you don't have permission to
> change the file properties (although I'd expect an error in that
> scenario).  Another option is that some non-Cygwin program is getting in
> the way and interfering with the permissions.

This could also be a result of default ACL entries on the directory 
'test'.  Dani, you might want to try 'setfacl -b test' and/or 'setfacl 
-k test'.  ('setfacl -h' will give you more information.)

Ken


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