[X-Newbies] Re: OS 10.3.7 on CD?

[Robert Ameeti]

>On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 11:11:52PM -0500, Charles Martin wrote:
>:
>: >From: Vincent Cayenne <vcayenne at mac.com>
>: >It's good but is not *necessary*.
>:
>: We have differing definitions of necessary, apparently. I mean
>: "necessary if you want to avoid trouble." You apparently mean
>: "necessary in that your machine will explode if you don't," and call
>: that wrong. By that definition, I agree. I don't mean the latter, I
>: mean the former.
>
>The only time I run Repair Permissions is after an OS X update.
>
>--
>Eugene

I was going to stay out of this but I find it interesting that Eugene would pick 'after' as his choice.

In my experience, I've found that an installer will have problems if it tries to do stuff and things aren't the way they should be. And thus, repairing permissions before the install allows the installer to proceed as it desires.

And then, I do believe that Apple has recently started doing the repair permissions thing as a final step of its system updates for those items that they've touched. If you've been doing a incremental update at each point release lately, I think you will have found that running Repair Permissions hasn't been doing much of anything lately. Vincent, am I correct?  But yes Charles, if a user hasn't done an update for several point versions, then yes, they may need to do a Repair Permissions to catch up with all the Repair Permissions that Apple isn't recognizing need to be done.

My suggestion is to do it once manually, then do each incremental update via Apple's Software Update, and you'll not find much of any benefit from running them afterward. But running them before is handy since wayward installers will not be well behaved and certainly could have mucked with things (as well as life just throwing those random bits around the drive every other Tuesday.)
-- 

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Robert Ameeti

The greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

- Jonas Salk
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