Open Stack

Excerpts from Robert Collins's message of 2015-06-18 06:40:33 +1200:
> An unintended side effect of the requirements refactoring was that we
> changed from preserving the 'x' bit on setup.py, to discarding it.
> This happened when we started writing the file atomically rather than
> in-place - a good robustness improvement.
> 
> Previously the requirements sync, which enforces setup.py contents had
> made no statement about the file mode. Now it unintentionally is.
> 
> We could do several things:
>  - preserve the file mode (stat the old, use its mode in open on the temp file)
>  - force the mode to be +x
>  - force the mode to be -x [the current behaviour]
> 
> After a brief IRC discussion in #openstack-olso we're proposing that
> forcing the mode to be -x is appropriate.
> 
> Our reasoning is as follows:
>  - './setup.py XYZ' is often a bug - unless the shebang in the
> setup.py is tolerant of virtualenvs (not all are), it will do the
> wrong thing in a virtual env. Similarly with PATH.
>  - we don't require or suggest users of our requirements syncronised
> packages run setup.py at all:
>     - sdists and releases are made in the CI infrastructure
>     - installation is exclusively via pip
> 
> So it seems like a slight safety improvement to remove the x bit - and
> possibly (we haven't thought it all the way through yet) also remove
> the shebang entirely, so that the contract becomes explicitly
> 'setup.py is not executable'.
> 
> Please raise concerns or objections here; if there are none I'll
> likely put up a patch to remove the shebang early next week, or
> whenever I get reminded of this.

+1 both to using -x and to removing the shebang.

Doug