CentOS - Oct 2019 - ls permissions format changed in CentOS 8

Found it. It happens from the process buffer inside Lugaru Epsilon. I think 
ls thinks it's doing a DIRED output instead of a shell output. Now I need 
to figure out why it thinks that. This wasn't happening in CentOS 7.

--On Friday, October 25, 2019 6:13 PM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> Found it. It happens from the process buffer inside Lugaru Epsilon. I
> think ls thinks it's doing a DIRED output instead of a shell output.
Now
> I need to figure out why it thinks that. This wasn't happening in
CentOS
> 7.
I'm puzzled. I can't find anything in the Gnu coreutils manual to
describe
this format. I do note that outside Epsilon, the sort order changes, 
ignoring leading dots and the case of filenames. So it seems like a locale 
thing.

<https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#Directory-listing>

Notable environment variable differences:

Outside, LS_COLORS has a very long string. LANG=en_US.UTF-8. TERM=xterm.

Inside, LS_COLORS is present but empty. LANG=C. TERM=dumb.

Changing these doesn't seem to fix the abbreviated permissions field. 
Setting LANG does change the sort order so at least I understand that.

I may have to pull the coreutils-8.30-6.el8.x86_64 sources to see how ls 
makes these decisions.

--On Friday, October 25, 2019 6:39 PM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> I may have to pull the coreutils-8.30-6.el8.x86_64 sources to see how ls
> makes these decisions.
I pulled the coreutils SRPM and it won't build because it wants texinfo and 
dnf says it doesn't exist, using either the builddep or search subcommands. 
(There may be other builddep issues but texinfo is notable for being in the 
vault's SRPMs but not on the mirrors.)

I think the problem likes in the strmode API used in ls.c and it seems like 
that comes from libbsd, but I can't be sure until I get a workable build 
tree so the coreutils SRPM will install.

BTW, another data point: I chmod'd a file to 0000 and now all I get is
"-."
for the mode string. It completely chops everything but the file type and 
the ACL indicator. OTOH, if I set it to 0660, I get the full string. It 
doesn't truncate the last octet.

[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0000 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -l yes.c
-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0006 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
-rw-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0060 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
----rw----. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0600 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
-rw-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c