Item9990: File permission checks in configure script erroneously report errors for "advanced" file systems like AFS

Running Foswiki on a server with the AFS file system (or potentially any other file system with advanced rights management) results in the configure script reporting lots of file/directory permission errors (6 errors, 24 warnings) although the installation works just fine. The reason for this behavior is that the Unix permissions don't matter on AFS. AFS has its own permission systems that enables multiple users and groups with different permission per file/directory.

Suggested solution:

• Detect file system and use file system-specific checks. (Hard to implement if there are more file systems such as AFS. Fast to run.)
• Check permissions by actually reading/writing files/directories instead of using commands. (Fail-safe solution that should work for any file system. Potentially slow due many reads/writes/deletes.)

-- AndreasKeil - 10 Nov 2010

Confirming, though as you mention, the solutions are difficult. So this will probably continue to sit in the backlog

-- GeorgeClark - 14 Oct 2013

We've changed Foswiki 2.0 to use filetest 'access'; which hopefully addresses this issue. Please check the current behaviour using 2.0.3 on an AFS system.

-- GeorgeClark - 19 Nov 2015

Sorry, I changed jobs and I am no longer using Foswiki. Somebody else has to confirm.

-- AndreasKeil - 01 Aug 2016

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