[cmeisenzahl]

It seems like everywhere I look I see the answer to some problems being that one needs to "repair permissions". Why is that? What is the story w/ the problem? One site I checked recommended doing it weekly.

It seems somewhat analogous to half of mysterious windows problems being solved by rebooting.

I remember 10 years ago we would fix strange things often by "zapping the p-ram". :-)


It's just that OS X seems so robust, this permissions business seems odd.


Chris

[Moose]

Originally posted by cmeisenzahl:
It seems like everywhere I look I see the answer to some problems being that one needs to "repair permissions". Why is that? What is the story w/ the problem? One site I checked recommended doing it weekly.

That site is run by retards.

I remember 10 years ago we would fix strange things often by "zapping the p-ram". :-)

It's actually more along the lines of REBUILDING THE DESKTOP !!! Except that actually did something.

Running the "repair permissions" thing as a part of weekly maintenance is un-necessary. Only do it if you're having a problem that appears as though it is caused by permissions not being set properly.

[TETENAL]

If you authenticate an installer with your admin password, it has root privileges. It can do everything. Everything means that it can also set wrong permissions in case it's a faulty installer done by an inexperienced developer. It is rather easy to make a faulty installer if you need to install parts of the software at different locations (to be safe you'd have to make multiple packages and a meta-package and that's more effort).

"Repairing permissions" means restoring permissions to the factory defaults. It's not necessary to do this every week, but it might help if you experience odd problems. It's a low cost troubleshooting step, that's why it is suggested so often.

[CharlesS]

If you're having a problem that could be related to permissions, then repair permissions. You don't need to repair permissions every week or every month, though, and you don't need to run repair permissions every time you install a Software Update.

For my views on this whole issue, go here:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...59#post2416578

[cmeisenzahl]

Thanks very much guys!!! :-)


Chris