On Wed, 2016-08-03 at 10:11 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:

* Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

[ So I answered similarly to another patch, but I'll just re-iterate
and change the subject line so that it stands out a bit from the
millions of actual patches ]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Pavel Machek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Everyone knows what 0644 is, but noone can read S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR |
S_IRCRP | S_IROTH (*). Please don't do this.

Absolutely. It's *much* easier to parse and understand the octal
numbers, while the symbolic macro names are just random line noise and
hard as hell to understand. You really have to think about it.

So we should rather go the other way: convert existing bad symbolic
permission bit macro use to just use the octal numbers.

In addition to that I'd love to have something even easier to read, a few common?
variants of the permissions field of 'ls -l' pre-defined. I did some quick?
grepping, and collected the main variants that are in use:

		PERM_r________	0400
		PERM_r__r_____	0440
		PERM_r__r__r__	0444

[etc]

While the proposed PERM_ variants are easily read,
using a single style instead of 2+ incompatible
symbolic styles makes treewide misuse identification
via grep style tools easier.