[Ham-Mac] "repairing permissions" is not necessarily good Mac hygiene

[Richard Rucker]

On Jan 31, 2006, at 8:15 PM, harris ruben wrote:

> Today I was unable to Repair Disk Permissions. After it would  
> start, a dialog box would appear saying:
>
> Here's what you do to fix this:
>
> 1. Open HD>Library>Receipts
> 2. Find iTunes.pkg and iTunes4.pkg and drag them off onto the desktop
> 3. Restart with the Install 1 CD and run Disk Utilities from the  
> pulldown menu
> 4. Run "Repair Disk Permissions" from there (I had to run it twice)
> 5. Run "Repair Disk" and then Quit.
> 6. The system will restart, and then put pack the 2 iTunes pkg into  
> HD>Library>Receipts

There's an easier way.  Just drag the Icon for iTunes 6.0.2 (this is  
the only version that produces this problem in the latest Tiger, OS X  
10.4.4.) out of the Applications folder and onto the desktop, repair  
permissions, then return it to the Apps folder.

That said, "repairing permissions" was a solution to a problem that  
Apple developed back in the early days of OS X when folks hadn't yet  
tumbled to the fact that booting a Mac into OS 9 without dismounting  
its OS X volume first would likely result in OS 9 running rough-shod  
over files belonging to OS X and damaging their permissions settings,  
among other bad things.  The source of the problem was that OS-9 was  
not designed to deal properly with Unix file structures.

Running your older applications within the Classic application avoids  
this problem.  Think of Classic as "diapers for OS 9."

For an enlightening review of this still somewhat controversial  
subject, see "Exercises in Futility Part 2:  Repairing Permissions is  
Useless," and the comments which it produced:

   <http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000410.php>

Dick Rucker, KM4ML