push and pop warning can generate "Operation not permitted" error

[Philippe Cloutier]

The push and pop quilt subcommands call touch for each patched file. The way it is called, touch can generate an error due to insufficient permissions, and that error is sent straight to the terminal.

The touch call intends to set file modification times. As explained in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/953098/change-file-time-touch Linux does not allow changing mtime for a user which is neither root nor the user owning the file. This means that it is impossible for several people each owning some files to manage the same patched software, even if they are part of the same group and that group has full permissions on all files, unless they have access to a common account.

Either quilt should manage times in a way that does not depend on a single user managing the software, or the failure can be considered unimportant, and quilt should just report failures differently. The latter approach could involve replacing touch's output with a clear error/warning message, limiting the number of errors displayed to 1, or adding an option to quiet such issues.

cloph2@SWIKID02:/var/www/html/foncierpedia$ quilt pop
Removing patch tracker_prevent_edit_conflict.diff
Restoring lang/fr/language.php
Restoring lang/fr/language.js
Restoring templates/tiki-view_tracker_item.tpl
Restoring tiki-view_tracker_item.php
Restoring lib/core/Services/Tracker/Controller.php
touch: setting times of './lang/fr/language.php': Operation not permitted
cloph2@SWIKID02:/var/www/html/foncierpedia$ quilt push
touch: setting times of '.pc/tracker_prevent_edit_conflict.diff/lang/fr/language .php': Operation not permitted
Applying patch tracker_prevent_edit_conflict.diff
patching file lang/fr/language.js
patching file lang/fr/language.php
patching file lib/core/Services/Tracker/Controller.php
patching file templates/tiki-view_tracker_item.tpl
patching file tiki-view_tracker_item.php

Now at patch tracker_prevent_edit_conflict.diff
cloph2@SWIKID02:/var/www/html/foncierpedia$

Ubuntu 14.04.5, using quilt 0.61-1
I could not find any hint that this is fixed in quilt 0.65.

[Philippe Cloutier (chealer-gmail)]

I'm sorry to report that this is not merely "cosmetic". I just noticed there is also a behavioral impact; when such a warning is triggered while running - for example - quilt pop 5, if the first de-application causes the warning, only 1 patch will be popped.