Staff/Admin group permission weirdness
November 11th, 2003 by admin
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p>It appears that the “staff” group has disappeared in fresh installs of Panther, which is causing issues because the my .pkg installers set up group permissions of staff. Also, the installers are mysteriously changing the group of / to staff, which is very troubling. So you install IRAF, it turns / into the staff group, and then you try to install TABLES and it complains “Permission to install in the default place denied,” because iraf is not IN the staff group, and then shouldn’t be able to write in /, even if /iraf is already created and owned by iraf. What a headache.
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p>The fix seems to be to put the / group back as admin, not staff. This can be done with the “repair permissions” feature in Disk Utility, but that’s overkill. From the command line just do:
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% sudo chgrp admin /
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p>If you upgraded or archived and installed from Jaguar, then I believe both the Iraf User and your own account will still be in the staff group and this will probably not cause you any problems. This may be related to the error that is occuring at the end of the installation process, which you can ignore. I think there are some bugs in the MacOS X Installer Ulitity that need to be worked out.
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