Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Stupid Developers Make Life Suck

Note to OS X installer devel­op­ers: if you change per­mis­sions on any sub­fold­er of /System, break­ing print­ing, Spot­light search­ing, and track­pad dri­vers, I will kneecap you.

I have a Net­gear MA111 USB Prism-based 802.11b wire­less adapter. I bought it for test­ing KisMAC and fool­ing around with wire­less pro­to­cols. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Net­gear does­n’t make dri­vers for OS X for the device, but D‑Link’s DWL-122 is also USB and has a Prism chipset, and so their dri­vers make the Net­gear adapter work.

But D‑Link’s installer is a piece of total shit. They use the built-in Installer.app to run the installer, so there’s no points to take off for some Flash-based or Car­bonized instal­la­tion process. But, their devel­op­ers appar­ent­ly don’t know how file per­mis­sions works on a Unix-based sys­tem, and man­age to break the OS when they install a kext in /System/Library/Extensions.

Oh, they also put their pref­er­ence pane in /System/Library/PreferencePanes, which is reserved for Apple-only pref­er­ence panes, appar­ent­ly unaware of the exis­tence of /Library/PreferencePanes for installing any third-par­ty (that’s you, D‑Link!) pref­er­ence panes.

I can’t speak with as much vit­ri­ol about /System/Library/StartupItems or /System/Library/Frameworks, but I have a feel­ing that the same thing applies: /Library for third-par­ty items, because /System/Library belongs to the OS, and the OS only.

Again: if you write an installer for frame­works, pref­er­ence panes, and exten­sions for OS X, don’t break the sys­tem. I will per­son­al­ly hunt you down and punch you in the face if you do.