Path Finder 4.8: known issues on Leopard

Now you probably got surprised when you’ve read this topic name, because we repeatedly told that Path Finder 4.8 is compatible with Leopard. For the most part it certainly is, but unfortunately the last Leopard seed reserved a couple of surprises for us that I thought you would like to know when planning your Leopard upgrade.

As I eluded alluded in my previous blog post on this topic, testing on an unfinished OS is a tricky business. I saw Path Finder bugs appear in one OS seed, disappear in the next couple of seeds, reappear in the fourth one and then disappear again. Generally if we saw a bug that persisted through more than two seeds, we proceeded with fixing it. Therefore you can understand why Mac developers are getting annoyed by the fact that Apple didn’t give us access to the Leopard Gold Master seed before the general release date - we have no idea if some of the issues below will still persist on the Leopard GM which is to be released on Friday. Here’s the current list of the known Path Finder 4.8 bugs on the pre-release Leopard build:

A folder popping up in the Dock while copying/moving/deleting files. Path Finder uses a helper tool called “ctask” to do its copy/move/delete operations - it launches and quits when the operation is complete. Somehow this background tool materialized in a form of a folder which behaves like an application popping up in the Dock when it launches. It doesn’t affect the quality of the copy at all - it is just kind of funny to watch. The history of this bug looks as following: fixed itself in build 9A343, reappeared in 9A466, fixed again in 9A527 and reappeared on the last seed. Now Steve’s bet that it disappears in the GM, and I’m still kind of nervous that it won’t.

Operations as root fail - this is a biggie that suddenly appeared on the last Leopard seed. The bug manifests itself as following: one operation as root is usually possible the first time upon installation of Path Finder, all further operations as root fail, also as a side effect - the “Quit” menu gets disabled when such operation was unsuccessful. After discovering the issue we immediately contacted Apple to ask what’s going on. It turned out that they implemented some additional restrictions for helper tools running as root to make the OS more secure. It is now considered unsafe to use any relative load paths in setuid helper programs. So the fix number one suggested by Apple -

-is to use absolute paths. Usually @executable_path is just used by apps that want to be drag installable. Apple typically ships an installer for software that requires setuid helpers, but we can understand the desire to maintain Path Finder as a drag-installable app.

Yes, we don’t really want to ship as an installer, because it seems that people generally don’t like them. Most of users prefer just to drag their app to the /Applications folder, because it seems more transparent and intuitive.

Another possibility to fix suggested by Apple would be

to replace your setuid helper tool with a daemon started by launchd. This is the direction we would like to see developers go and it’s a more secure approach.

Now this is also a bit problematic - the cool part of our helper tool is that it is not hanging around all the time. It quits and launches when needed. A daemon would always work in the background which is probably less desirable. However if we don’t have any other choice we will prefer this option. This requires some considerable work in restructuring our code and we still hope that there’s an easier solution. We’re still discussing this issue with Apple and will hopefully decide soon which road to take. This bug is highly unlikely to disappear by itself and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience that this issue might cause you.

When you reveal the PF Desktop in Expose - the Finder Desktop is shown instead. This is because we used an undocumented hack to make Path Finder desktop “stick” when hitting Expose, and it’s not surprising that this method got broken on Leopard. We hope we will find another hack soon :)

Issues with tooltips in Column View - when you hover over long file names in Column View, it should normally show you the full name in a tooltip, but it shows some weird numbers instead. This issue would be completely harmless if the Size Browser wouldn’t take it so badly - unfortunately it crashes because of this for some reason. Steve thinks that this issue will fix itself on the Leopard GM build, but I again remain skeptical. We placed bets yesterday - if he’s right I will have to send him a T-Shirt with “München” written on it :)

We hope to address those issues as soon as possible. We’re especially upset about the operations as root issue, since it has taken us by surprise and so late - we were testing Path Finder on Leopard since more than one year and if those OS restrictions were implemented earlier, we would have had more time to find a solution.

Update : looks like all issues mentioned above are still present on the GM build. The final build also brought some new bugs - issues with Connect to Server dialog, cosmetic issue with Desktop selection and a bug where “move to” contextual menu item copies files instead of moving them. We’re now intensively working on fixing all those issues as soon as possible in the next maintenance update. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.