Whee! Apple Bug Friday number one hundred! Yay! (And on a Friday! And only one bug!)

... OK so no one else is excited. Whatever. It seems like Peter Hosey and I are the only ones who do Apple Bug Fridays anymore. Dan Wood, the creator of this meme, doesn't even seem to participate at all. I suppose it's not surprising that a meme like this (that actually requires work) is only barely breathing after almost two years. I can't exactly say my participation has been unwavering, but at least I made up for it. :)

I wonder if people have been filing fewer bugs, or if the whole aspect of publicizing your bug has just fallen by the wayside, and everyone has gone back to reporting bugs in private. Apple Bug Friday is the only thing that gets me to file bugs with Apple, though, so I'll continue on.

But anyway, enough with the nostalgia and back to the bug. My soon-to-be-over temporary sysadmin job has given me a lot of experience with Mac OS X Server. One of the things I've noticed with the server admin tools (Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, Server Monitor) is that they often disable things willy-nilly without any indication why they are grayed out. This is really annoying behavior, and today's bug is one example.

In Workgroup Manager, if you switch to the "Sharing" pane, click on a share point which is owned by "root", and then try to propagate the permissions to subfolders and subfiles, you'll find that you won't be able to. In the "Access" tab, if you click the action menu (the one with the little gear), the "Propagate Permissions..." menu item will be disabled/grayed out. This is particularly frustrating if you're just trying to propagate an access control list down the line to subfolders, when there are 30 or so subfolders in the share point.

No! I do not want to go through each of these subfolders, add entries to the access control list of each, and then propagate permissions on each. Argh.

How do you workaround this? Temporarily change the owner of the share point to something other than root, propagate the permissions, and then change the owner back to root. Phew. Mad props to the user Mads over on the Apple Discussion boards. Your suggestion was a major timesaver.

The $64,000 question, though, is why the heck Apple thought it was a good idea to disable the menu item for share points owned by root. If Apple is worried about people propagating permissions that have ownership set to root, why not just throw up a warning dialog instead of graying out the menu item with no specified reason? (Filed: 5260197.)

P.S. The "rdar://###" format is deprecated. Use "rdar://problem/###" when posting Radar URLs.