Change record status: 
Project: 
Introduced in branch: 
7.x
Introduced in version: 
7.83
Description: 

Drupal 7 now has a skip_permissions_hardening setting (backported from D8/9) which stops Drupal trying to modify the file permissions on settings files.

/**
 * Skip file system permissions hardening.
 *
 * The system module will periodically check the permissions of your site's
 * site directory to ensure that it is not writable by the website user. For
 * sites that are managed with a version control system, this can cause problems
 * when files in that directory such as settings.php are updated, because the
 * user pulling in the changes won't have permissions to modify files in the
 * directory.
 */
# $conf['skip_permissions_hardening'] = TRUE;

https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/7.83/sites/default/defa...

Impacts: 
Site builders, administrators, editors