KDE and the executable bit

[David Faure]

On Monday 28 January 2008, Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Monday 28 January 2008, you wrote:
> > Le *me* know where to get one *without*.
> 
> You cannot get executables from websites, mail, like you can on Windows, 
> and that is due to the exec bit. This is why it shouldn't be ignored.

We are NOT ignoring it!!! This is really the wrong way of describing the issue.
Ignoring it would mean that we would execute foo.sh files even if they don't have +x -- we do NOT do that.
We honor the +x bit on files where it makes sense.

We do not consider a JPEG file with the exec bit as executable, because, although
we "do not ignore +x", we don't either "fully trust +x", which would be wrong.

Anyway, replying to another post: I'm not sure about asking for confirmation before running.
We don't do that for executables either, and it would be quite annoying in both cases.
But maybe we want to execute shellscripts inside a konsole so that the user can see its output;
I just wrote a script for my wife, and it needed a konsole -e wrapper so that she could see
the output (but a better wrapper would also not automatically close the window when the script
is done). Making script execution less silent would be good. Making it "are you really really sure"
might be a bit annoying and inconsistent... unless we also do it for executables, and with
a dontshowagain checkbox.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).