[Pythonmac-SIG] Ownership of installed Python on Mac

[Nicholas Riley]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 11:35:11PM +0100, Michael Foord wrote:
> On 9 August 2011 22:42, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> Hmm... for 3.2 and 2.7 I was using Activestate installers not Python.org
> ones - so perhaps it's their bug (in which case sorry for the noise).

Nope - this is from a new Mac mini that shipped with Lion and has not
had any non-system Pythons installed:

bookworm% ls -ld /Library/Python/*/site-packages 
drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  136 Jun 25 08:05 /Library/Python/2.3/site-packages
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Jul  2 17:08 /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Jul  2 17:08 /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Jul  2 17:08 /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages

I'd say if any of the python.org or ActiveState Python installers mess
with these directories' ownership or permissions, they're doing
something wrong.  While the contents of these directories is up to the
user, their permissions are part of the OS install.

>   Many folders in the System domain that were previously owned by
>   the admingroup are now owned by the wheel group.

This isn't quite right (the "System domain" means /System); it's the
part a bit later that says "All subdirectories within /Library now
have mode 755 (writable only by root) permissions instead of mode 775
(writable by the admin group) except... [a bunch of directories that
do not include Python]".

Anyway, the workaround is simple enough - and yeah, still pretty
necessary to install pip/virtualenv themselves.

--
Nicholas Riley <njriley at illinois.edu>