hi stephane, thank you for your input. i think i found the reason for this strange behavior: affected system: root:wheel working system: root:admin best, dennis Am 28.06.12 17:15, schrieb Stephane Sudre: On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Dennis Wolter <dennis.wolter@native-instruments.de> wrote: in the packagemaker man page. what are the recommended permissions and what are the criteria for setting those? they obviously differ under certain circumstances (build environment? destination folder?). Ideally, recommendations should be based (for well known locations) on the permissions/ownerships defined in the OS Installation packages. So it may be reasonable to assume that ideally PackageMaker inspects the receipts of the OS Installation packages (such as com.apple.pkg.Essentials) or use the same API as the Disk Utility application when it repairs permissions (which is also based on the receipts AFAIK). This would explain a difference between 2 major OS releases. This would not explain a difference between the exact same OS release (all security updates being installed) on 2 different machines. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com i realized that the only difference between the two 10.7 systems was the owner group of my system partition's root directory. i changed the group of the working system's root directory to wheel and was able to reproduce the behavior. the package's IFPkgFlagDefaultLocation is always relative to root, right? so i assume that packagemaker uses just root for determining recommended permissions for the payload. i checked other 10.7 systems, they all come up with wheel group for the root directory. so i guess, my "working" 10.7 just worked as i expected from 10.6 (probably it was upgraded some time from 10.6 and kept the permissions) by accident. strange: DiskUtility's perm repair tool does not complain about the group for root directory, no matter if it is set to admin or wheel.