On Sat, 14 Aug 2021 at 12:54, bruno zanetti <bzanetti00@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Il giorno sab 14 ago 2021 alle ore 15:39 Adriano Vilela Barbosa <adriano.vilela@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Yesterday I came across a very weird behavior while annotating a pdf
>> file in Okular. Long story short: I opened a read-only pdf file
>> (permissions: 400), inserted some comments and hit the save button. At
>> this point, I thought I had been working on a write-enabled copy of
>> the file. After a while, I realized that I was actually working on the
>> read-only version of the file, that somehow got saved to disk when I
>> hit the save icon. Okular was not only able to save the file to disk,
>> but the file permissions were changed to 644.
>>
>> I initially thought this was an Okular problem. However, after some
>> more testing, I was able to reproduce the problem with Xournal. This
>> makes me think that the problem is not with Okular or Xournal, but
>> with some common library used by both of these packages (maybe
>> libpoppler?).
>>
>> Has anybody had this problem? Can anybody reproduce it?
>>
>> I'm using Debian testing.
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>> Adriano
>
>
> Hi Adriano,
> the read-only permission on the pdf file just prevents it's
contents to be changed. It still can be deleted if the directory it
belongs to is not write protected.
> Editor programs usually do not directly change the contents of a
file but rather save them to a temporary new one (with default
permissions), delete the original and then rename the new file replacing
the original one. I don't know if Okular works this way, but I think it
quite likely does.
>
> Have a good release day!
>
> Bruno
>
>
Hi Bruno,
Thanks for your reply.
Indeed, what you describe may be what's happening. If I change the
permissions of the directory where the file is to read-only, I get an
error message when trying to save the file. The error message says the
file could not be saved (error: access denied), and also says that it
could not write to file.pdf.part (this .part file must be temporary
file you mentioned).
I understand this mechanism, but I think this is quite controversial
and problematic. I mean, as an end user I don't care what the editor
is doing behind the scenes; it just shouldn't be able to modify a file
marked as read-only.
This is the first time I came across this behavior. No text editor I
ever used does this; LibreOffice doesn't do it either (rather, it
shows a message saying the document is open in read-only and shows an
"Edit Document" button, which allows you to edit the document and then
save it under a different name).
The question is: should I file a bug report somewhere? I really don't
want editors overwriting my read-only documents...
Thanks again,
Adriano
Well, some editors take care of not overwriting read-only files, some others (like kate, kwite) don't...
But I second your reasoning, the right behaviour IMHO would be to respect the file permissions, regardless of the mechanism of the underlying filesystem.
I'd suggest you report the issue on
bugs.kde.org since it doesn't seem to be a debian specific issue.
Best
Bruno