Re: MacOSX 10.0.X Permissions uncorrectly set

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr () eclipsed net>]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 10:25:00AM +0200, patpro wrote:
> Sounds like pax installer used to design .pkg has something to do with this
> behavior.

I've been staying largely out of this discussion since I have not
used (nor do I intend to use) MacOS X, but I have a hard time
countenancing such a slur against pax, which is only an interface to
various archive formats and does strictly what it's told.

That is, pax takes things out of archive format at exactly the
umask of the user performing the unarchiving OR, with the -pe flag
set, at exactly the permissions and ownership (by uid) they entered
the archive. It's been doing that just fine for a long long time.

It's been used as a basic part of the NetBSD installation process
for quite some time, and it's never caused us any problems, so I
don't see why it would all of a sudden under MacOS X, unless it
was insufficiently taught how to grok HFS(+), which is not implausible
but seems like it would have cropped up in some more obvious way
before now.

Of all the response so far to all this, the one that's made the most
sense to me was Etaoin Shrdlu's in message ID
<3B3BEFCE.BC8D79A6 () deaddrop org> which you may or may not be able
to read at:

  
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/archive.pike?start=2001-06-24&threads=1&fromthread=1&list=1&end=2001-06-30&mid=194083&;

(The securityfocus.com php stuff seems to be returning an error when
just handed that url, at lest for me, in Opera.)

The thrust of this post is that it was a conversion of a system from
MacOS X beta to MacOS X release that brought out these evil
permissions on various directories (as Peter Tonoli points out in
message ID <Pine.LNX.4.21.0106292202500.455-100000@heatseeker>,
which you can maybe find at:

  
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/archive.pike?start=2001-06-24&threads=1&fromthread=1&list=1&end=2001-06-30&mid=194238&;

this problem is *not* restricted to /Users/*/Desktop, so it's
probably not just the skeleton home directory permissions that are
broken).

Perhaps someone with both a beta and a release installer could test
this theory by installing on a fresh machine first with the beta,
adding a few users, making the upgrade, and adding a few more users,
then wiping things out and installing just the release version?

Seems like this would make it much easier to track down just what's
corrupting the file system's permission modes, and make it actually
possible for Apple to provide some kind of fix.

(Hey, maybe I'll see if I can get access to each of these and do
that myself next work week.)

Cheers...

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net