Re: [Bug-tar] bug: extracting permissions

[Paul Eggert]

Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden> writes:

> I would propose to change --same-permissions/--no-same-permissions
> option names to something more meaningful to avoid confusion. For
> example
>
> --same-permissions    --ignore-umask
> --no-same-permissions --apply-umask

But the word "umask" is less meaningful to ordinary users than
"permissions" is.  And it's nice to have --no-X to be the inverse of
--X, rather than --X-Z and --Y-Z be inverses.

Also, there's the argument of stability.  I'm not saying
--same-permissions is a perfect name, but it has been with us for over
15 years and we haven't gotten many complaints about it (with one
notable exception: a complaint from RMS that caused us to add
"--preserve-permissions" as an alias in November 1989 :-).