In the same way that adding extensions to the older OSes (9, 8, 7, 6, 5,
etc) patched the system to allow your Mac to do things that Apple had
not gotten to yet (or may did not intend to do), 3rd party developers
will make subtle changes to the way Apple has set up UNIX to run on the
Mac. If these are done "highly correctly" then there is no change to the
file system, but "highly correctly" was hard to achieve especially in
10.0 - 10.1.2. so 3rd party folks would sometimes take shortcuts to get
at what they wanted to do, which would involve things like changing the
ownership status of files and just generally mucking around in places
that they had to.
Usually, the changes would seem to be benign, but over time some of the
files could get corrupted and other programs that depended on a file to
be in a certain status would find this was not the case and the program
could crash depending on how well the error handling was built in to
it -- one drawback to running on a system that your program crashing
won't bring the whole system down is that sometimes you get sloppy and
don't worry about exiting gracefully like you used to.
The Disk Perms program resets various files' status back to what they
were when shipped by Apple. Note: it does not replace them with new
copies!. It can fix a lot of potential problems, but it is not a
cure-all. We still need to be careful about installing every cool thing
under the sun on our machines blissfully thinking that we won't have
problems. 10.2 goes a long way in making UNIX even more stable on our
machines, so hopefully 3rd party developers will muck around less and
less with file perms and stuff like that (Actually, this happens even at
Apple!!!!), but in truth, it will be a while (maybe 10.6 or so -- just a
guess).
Please note, the comments are not meant in anyway to imply this is not a
good OS, in many, many, many ways this is probably one of the best
overall desktop OSes to come along in a while, and it should only get
better.
Jerry
On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 07:23 PM, Ward Oldham wrote:
> Hi Group,
>
> I picked up this tip off Macintouch . . .
>
> Searching the discussions on the apple site I found a terrific tip. Run
> the repair disk permissions script in disk utility on the boot drive.
> It will fix tons of permissions with numerous directories. Since
> following this advice I've seen a marked speedup in booting and help
> viewer as well as a snappier finder and no freezes! There has been
> nothing but positive results in the thread. Give this a try and pass it
> along to the readers who might be having problems with 10.2. Apparently
> it corrects some booting problems on some mac's and allows previously
> unusable drivers to work.
>
> I have two Macs running OS X 10.2 and I never have a lick of a
> problem. ?After reading the above tip, I was curious to launch Disk
> Utility and verify that my Disk Permissions were in good health. ?It
> repaired problems on both my machines. ?Honestly, I?m not sure exactly
> what it did but if it promotes good system health, I won?t hesitate to
> run it.
>
> Maybe some of the UNIX gurus out there can decipher what?s being
> repaired. ?It definitely gives you specific details.
>
> Ward Oldham
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