[tex-live] strange changing permissions

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Adam R. Maxwell <amaxwell at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 19, 2010, at 4:17 AM, George N. White III wrote:
>
>> If we keep TL under a normal user ownership, console users with
>> admin rights can still do TL admin as on a personal Mac, we just have
>> to revert ownership (using sudo) before doing tladmin.  Running one
>> "chown" is a small fraction of the potential for damage that you could
>> get from a bug or intentional hack in one of the many TL admin tools.
>
> That makes sense, but who or what is changing the ownership such that you have to use chown?

If a user (probably has to be one with admin privs, but that is
normally the "owner" of the system)
does an update with the MacTeX GUI the permissions revert to ownership
by root (as will most
Apps).    We have a small number of Macs, each dedicated more or less
to a particular data set,
with most user needing access to the other Macs using ssh terminal
sessions to work with data
using Fortran and generate documents from the data using LaTeX as they
have done for years
using unix.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia