[Bigsister-general] Installation annoyances under OS-X

[<apt...@cy...>]

Hi,

I'm trying to install Big Sister 0.98a2 under OS-X[1] under its own
username[2] using some tools[3] installed by Fink[4].

I get massive quantities of 'permission denied' errors during 'make
install', specifically 'make install-common'. I've tried changing
permissions of files in the installation directories[5], changing
permissions in the installation directories[5], and finally changing
permissions given to the install.sh command within the Makefile[6]. Only
manually changing the Makefile had any effect.

Is there a good reason for permissions to be so tight on (say)
./etc/resources[7]? I don't like arbitrarily loosening permissions on
files but I can't see any other way of installing the code with the tools
as-written. Is there something obvious I'm missing here?

I haven't tried to run the client yet - that promises to be amusing since
the rest of the machines I'm monitoring are NT and Win2K, including the
display host. Are there any OS-X issues I should know about before I
proceed?

One irritation after another,

-- Bob

[1] v10.1.5
[2] 'bs'; Principle of Least Privilege...
[3] And the reason that gcc and make don't ship by default is...? Or do I
blame the guy who initially installed the server instead of Apple?
[4] Ugh ... I thought I put that horrid Debian installer far behind me.
Someone spent a lot of time specifically making dselect's UI incoherent
and difficult and I cannot fathom why. And someone ported it to a Mac!
[5] chmod -R u+w .
[6] Within vi, ':%s/555/755/gc' and ':%s/444/644/gc'
[7] In the Makefile, ./etc/resources is installed with mode 444 and a
later command tries to "echo 'some stuff' >> ./etc/resources". Under what
conditions should we expect that to succeed?