Re: INSTALL_SCRIPT question...

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi John,

* John Calcote wrote on Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:17:52PM CEST:
> Anyone out there know why the INSTALL_DATA variable resolves to  
> $(INSTALL) -m 0644, but the INSTALL_SCRIPT and INSTALL_PROGRAM variables  
> only resolve to $INSTALL, and not $INSTALL -m 0755?

It may simply be because of programs to be installed set-uid: for them,
you may want to override INSTALL_PROGRAM at least, so the mode is set
right.  Arguably, this doesn't explain the issue for INSTALL_SCRIPT, at
least not for modern systems which routinely ignore set-uid for scripts.

Note that there are bootstrapping cases where it is important that modes
of installed files be set atomically at install time, and that it would
not be sufficient to correct them later through an install-exec-hook:
For example, the coreutils package installs the "install" program itself
(ok, it doesn't usually need set-uid).  For shared libraries, there are
a few such cases (mostly handled inside the libtool script).

Cheers,
Ralf