bug#41570: 26.3; dired chown

[A. Peter Blicher]

Maybe I should have added that although I still see the usefulness of this 
feature, I have no opinion on whether you should close the bug, since if 
anyone implements this, it's going to be me anyway.

--peter

On 9/3/2020 2:36 PM, A. Peter Blicher wrote:
> I'd say that while the windows takeown is crippled compared to chown, it 
> would be useful to have an easy way in dired to invoke it, since it is better 
> than nothing.  I don't at this point claim that takeown is the same as chown, 
> or that dired chown should invoke takeown, just that takeown functionality 
> would be useful in dired.
>
> Apparently, with enough fancy footwork it is possible in windows to 
> effectively chown, but from what I can see, it's a lot of fancy footwork.
>
> --peter
>
> On 9/3/2020 1:38 PM, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> > Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> >
> > > > From: "A. Peter Blicher" <blicher@comcast.net>
> > > > Date: Wed, 27 May 2020 14:46:39 -0700
> > > >
> > > > Dired chown command complains that chown is not available for windows
> > > > systems.  However, windows versions >= 7 (at least) have the "takeown"
> > > > command, which while not as comprehensive as the unix chown command at
> > > > least allows the current user to take ownership of a file/dir, as long
> > > > as the user has admin privileges.  It would be useful for dired to
> > > > permit this possibility on windows systems.
> > >
> > > AFAIU, 'takeown' is different from 'chown', in that it only allows to
> > > change the file's owner to either the current user or the
> > > Administrators group, it doesn't allow you to change the ownership to
> > > any other user except one of those two.  Also, I think the command
> > > requires elevation, doesn't it (thus you mention "admin privileges")?
> > >
> > > So I'm not sure that command is a good replacement for 'chown', but
> > > maybe you have something in mind I'm missing?
> >
> > The proposal here was to change chown for takeown in Dired.  From the
> > discussion, it seems like this is not a technically good solution.
> >
> > Is there anything more to do here, or could this bug report be closed?
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Stefan Kangas