Re: testsuite failures when test scripts are run with zsh

[Jim Meyering]

Stefano Lattarini wrote:
...
>> Hmm, I'm a bit leery of making things read-only, but making sure
>> the files contain a "generated by ... " line near the top seems a
>> good idea.
> In truth, I don't find that much useful in order to prevent
> "unintentional" editing: I have ended up too many times modifying
> tests/defs instead of tests/defs.in, even if it has the customary
> address@hidden@' line at the top (yeah, stupid me, but I lost time
> anyway).  On the contrary, the fact that a file is read-only is a much
> clearer and outstanding indicator of the fact it should not be
> modified, and is anyway easily circumvented in the case you really
> need to modify that file.  I'm stressing this because I think that
> making generated files readonly would be very very useful to the
> absent-minded developer or contributor (e.g., me).

Hi Stefano and Ralf,

Ralf,
Why are you reluctant to make any generated file read-only?

I've been lobbying for this in many projects for a long time,
for exactly the same reasons.  I've wasted too much time
(even if it's just a minute or two per incident) by inadvertently
modifying a generated file rather than the template from which
it is generated.

The only potential gotcha is that when redirecting to the temporary
file, you have to be careful to remove the read-only file beforehand,
or to ensure that it writable.