Bug 166473 - Copying files across systems should preserve permissions if possible
Summary: Copying files across systems should preserve permissions if possible
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Target Management
Classification: Tools
Component: RSE (show other bugs)
Version: 1.0   Edit
Hardware: All All
: P3 enhancement (vote)
Target Milestone: Future   Edit
Assignee: dsdp.tm.rse-inbox CLA
QA Contact: Martin Oberhuber CLA
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Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: 170926
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Reported: 2006-12-01 07:23 EST by Martin Oberhuber CLA
Modified: 2007-05-09 10:38 EDT (History)
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Description Martin Oberhuber CLA 2006-12-01 07:23:32 EST 
When a file is copied from system A to system B, permission bits are not copied, unless both systems support TAR archives and "supertransfer" is activated.

In order to support permission bits for such copy, either
 - APIs need to be added to read / set permission bits and other extended
   attributes (does not seem practical), or
 - APIs need to be added to support supertransfer through archives in a more
   transparent manner. I
   think the best solution would be that
    - Each system type registers the kinds of supertransfer that it supports
    - During Copy, a "handshake" is done between source and target in order
      to come up with a common kind of supertransfer that both support
    - If a common supertransfer is found, permissions can be retained.
  This proposal is covered in bug 165890.
Comment 1 Martin Oberhuber CLA 2007-05-09 10:38:42 EDT 
We found problems with trying to preserve too many permissions (ACLs, Ownership) on Windows Vista, so we decided to not have RSE play he administrator game for now -- admins will likely prefer a commandline anyways. See bug 181667 comment 7 for details.

Some file properties like "Read Only", "Modification Time", should be preserved though. This could work great through EFS if generic properties were supported as suggested by bug 176051: the intersection of the properties supported for reading by the source filesystem and the properties supported for writing by the target file system should be copied.