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Repair Permissions info needed

One of our highest tech-support issues is application permissions and ownership. Our customers will reinstall their OS or add/remove users, and suddenly they're no longer able to patch their games because they only have read permission on the enclosing folder.

Unfortunately, it's not sufficient to Get Info on the app's folder, fix the permissions and ownership settings, and choose "Apply to Enclosed Items." For some reason, this will not fix any items inside an application bundle. I filed a radar on this (rdar://4112723) and it came back as "behaves correctly"--Engineering tells me:

The end-user is not supposed to change the ownership status of the contents of a package. The ownership and permissions of package contents are often set by the package constructor in such a way that any change will render them unusable and in such a way that there is no external way of knowing how to make changes. Allowing the user to apply to enclosed from the UI has been found to cause more problems than it allows to solve.

OS updates should not change the ownership of files so if that is happening then yes that would be considered a bug.

Well, this isn't very useful information; OS reinstalls have caused all sorts of file ownership issues since OS X 10.0, and nobody seems too keen to fix it. :| I guess this could inadvertently turn off the "execute-as-root" bit or something; we don't use that, but other apps certainly might.

One workable fix: it appears to be sufficient to do a chown/chmod -R from the command line. However, many of our users probably lack the sophistication to do this without lots of hand-holding, and it's a pretty grotesque fix. Of course, reinstalling the software from CD is another fix, but it's understandably disliked by tech support and users alike (this tends to require the user to download and reinstall several updates, which is a hassle, particularly if your Internet connection is less than great).

To summarize, wouldn't it be great if we could add our app to the "Repair Permissions" check list? It seems like this could solve a lot of problems for us. Unfortunately, I haven't got a clue as to how this could be accomplished. I know it involves the files at /Library/ Receipts/, but these don't seem to be in a human-readable format. I'm told that the Apple installer knows how to create receipts, but we already have our own in-house installer technology which gives us much more flexibility than Apple's installer will allow us; switching to Apple's installer wholesale is not an option.

Is anyone knowledgeable about Repair Permissions here? Is there another list which I should ask on?

Thanks for your help :)

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