So, I’m far from the first to discuss the voodoo surrounding repair permissions, but I’ve never seen quite such a flagrant violation of penal code 1984 (It is a felony to pass off your own sloppy programming as a user configuration issue)…
Yesterday I bought some software from the Apple store (the developers and software shall remain nameless, but suffice it to say that it was an expansion pack for a game). Came home in order to install it, that didn’t quite work…I’d installed a (n official) patch for the original game, making its version newer than the version in the expansion pack. OK, blow it away, and reinstall.
The installer is a PEF-based Stuffit thing (I didn’t realise people still used either PEF or Stuffit), so doesn’t know anything about the Authorisation Services API. OK, switch to an admin user, run the installer. Switch back to regular user, and run the game.
Erm, no in-game text. On any of the UI elements. That’s a bit strange. Let’s check the FAQ on their website; apparently there’s a particular file in the game which contains all of the text, if that’s corrupted then no text.
It’s not corrupted, it’s just unreadable by anyone except the user I installed it as. Quick su-chmod-exit, try again. OK, in-game text. Asks for the licence key. Enter it, gets accepted….asks for the licence key. Enter it, check it, gets accepted….asks for the licence key. Couple more times, checking really carefully now that I’ve entered the correct key (no acc1d3nt4l el1t3ne5s). Definitely doesn’t work.
Back to the website FAQ: I find the file where the licence key gets stored. In the app directory. Guess who it’s not writable by? That’s right, anyone…turns out that savegames get stored there too. So the application dir has to be writable by anyone who might want to play the game. Erm, that kindof sucks.
So I wrote to the company, explaining what I’d found, and got this response:
The fact that the game couldn’t write to the nwncdkey.ini file probably means that OS X is having some sort of file permissions issue on your Mac. You might want to boot to your OS X CD, run the disk utility, and run “Repair Disk” and “Repair Disk Permissions” on your hard drive.
Repeat after me: WTF? Their software is installed by a Stuffit installer, not by Installer.app – this means there’s no BOM, so there are no known permissions pertaining to that directory as far as the OS is concerned. If they got the permissions wrong on the way in (not unlikely, a number of my user accounts on various systems have custom umasks, and I bet Stuffit doesn’t check that) then Disk Utility isn’t going to do anything to fix their mistake. For completeness I ran a verify perms check, and indeed nothing came back (well yes something did, in a different area of the filesystem: I had myself chmodded an area of /Developer but last time I checked, Carbon games don’t make heavy use of the developer documentation). But the Cult Of Mac is strong, and its idols shall not be slighted, so running repair permissions is obviously the fix in this situation. Perhaps I should zap the PRAM, start with extensions off, rebuild the Desktop and sacrifice me a goat while I’m at it.
I’m going to write "a polite response" to this particular company’s support desk, explaining how repair perms works, why perms errors (in the BOM-perms-don’t-match-filesystem-perms sense) were not – could not have been – the cause of my issue and requesting that they switch to an installer platform which, well, understands the Mac OS X filesystem. And that they start writing user-specific data like savegames and so on into ~/Library/Application Support/.
