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

[Gerben Wierda]

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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