On Sat, 14 Aug 2021 at 12:54, bruno zanetti <bzanett...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Il giorno sab 14 ago 2021 alle ore 15:39 Adriano Vilela Barbosa > <adriano.vil...@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
