PB 12 with Leopard: can't repair permissions

Pelao

Hi

I have installed Leopard on my 12" 1.5 GHz Powerbook - no issues. However, the Repair Permissions function in Disk Utility does not work: it just runs the 'barbershop' bar endlessly, without graduating to the progress bar.

Anyone know what's up?

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jamesB

"Endlessly" can be a very long time
I think if you really let it run for a very log time, it just might finish.
Reports of abnormally long permission runs with Leopard have been many.

jb.

SINC

Running permission repair on my MBP 2.2 Ghz takes seven long minutes and gives me an error message every time. Sure hope they address the issue when 10.5.1 hits Software Update. Let it run the barbershop pole until it actually finished with the solid bar and time it, then you will know what to expect when you run it again.

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mguertin

It seems to be the isntalldb process that hangs up here .. Apple has switched their packaging format to run from a db instead of flat pkg files, and it seems to have to do a lot of work with the pkg database (probably parsing and fully loading it each time). Just watching it in Activity Monitor right now, it's working away and maxing out the machine. It's followed by "repair_packages" which ran very quickly. Took about 4 minutes total on my powerbook G4 1.6Ghz.

Methinks someone forgot to tweak that db before it went GM. Gonna see if I can browse/optimize it at all and if I can if it makes a difference.

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mguertin

Well, the database it's "installing" is, unfortunately, already indexed and there's nothing in it to cleanup to speed things up

The process is presumably it's flattening the entire (600,000+ row) database each and every time you repair permissions and loading it up in the manner that the repair_permissions task needs the information to be in.

This smells to me like they just didn't have the time to get the matching sub-components out the door in time to make the GM. I imagine we'll see this in a dot release soon enough .. if you're going to make the commitment to move all your information to a database presumably at some point making all the backend stuff to work directly from the database seems in order to me .. right now it's just jamming the format back into a way the underlying tools can deal with it

Lastly, the way their schema is setup there are going to be a _lot_ of joins required for any operation, especially in the magnitude of reading the entire databse (like for repairing permissions). I think this may be a little too much for sqlite to handle properly personally. If this is the direction they are taking then maybe it's time for Apple to move to a unified hi-performance database for things like this, Mail.app, iCal, etc...

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