Official answer: [OS X TeX] owner and groups in teTeX

[Joseph Slater]

I win! I'm going to Vegas!
On Monday, August 5, 2002, at 04:11  AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> Since this is about my distribution, here is the official answer:
>
> - Every file in a unix environment has a owner and a group, which are a 
> user-id and a group-id. These are integer numbers. When ls displays 
> them, it tries to match them with existing users on the system. If 
> there is no user or group with that specific number on your system, it 
> will display the number instead of the name.
> - I have designed my setup such that what is on your system is an exact 
> copy of my system when I do the build
> - When it is installed, I preserve these ownership and group 
> information on file, again to make sure there is only one variation of 
> the system around (otherwise, ownership might differ on different 
> systems and possible consequences could in theory hamper my support)
> - What I do in my build phase is to make sure the permissions of files 
> and directories are OK such that it can be used (every file will be at 
> least world readable) (Since the texmf tree hardly ever changes and 
> setting every bit on every file is a lengthy process, I removed that 
> step from a standard build a while back and I need to do it by hand 
> after I have installed a new texmf release myself. This is something I 
> might forget to do of course, but the texmf tree itself is normally in 
> an OK state so it does not matter. My action is just insurance).
>
> So, what you see are the user ids and group ids in the original teTeX 
> texmf release. This is harmless, as I have made sure the permissions 
> are ok for normal use (your TeX works, doesn't it?)
>
>> De facto, I tried to open some documentation files in TeXShop and this 
>> failed, probably due to this problem.
>
> Probably not due to this problem. But if you do have a problem, it is 
> best to say exactly what you are doing. And to be complete in 
> describing what happens (a bit more than 'this failed' ;-)
>
> Ignoring the adagium that one should not fix something that is not 
> broken, I have decided to overrule the ownership in the future and thus 
> new releases will have all files owned by root.admin.
>
> Yours,
>
> G
>
> (And now back to working on a new release for Mac OS X 10.2)
>
>
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Joseph C. Slater
(+1) 937-775-5085
http://www.cs.wright.edu/~jslater


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