Installed El Capitan yesterday. Process took almost half an hour.
Afterwards, brew just gave me a warning to do "chown" to my usr/local. That's it. Everything works fine.
BTW, thanks for the down vote?
My system was plenty protected already - it had a root account with a password only I knew. This is just more annoying Apple gatekeeping.
And yes, it is Apple "Gatekeeping"... the same gatekeeping that's kept OS X almost completely free of major hacks for over a decade. I don't consider that annoying but to each his own.
Why is this important? It's trivial to reformat my drive and have a fresh install. The stuff I have that's actually sensitive is in my home directory and still unprotected =/
For the 0.01% who need to screw around with the operating system directories, they can take the 90 seconds to hop into recovery mode.
This is a situation where 100% of the user community has a reasonable solution, 99.99% aren't inconvenienced in the slightest, and the security situation goes up significantly. It's like hiding ~/Library by default - 99% of users probably don't need to mess around there, and hiding it probably reduced a lot of failure modes. (and, once again, for the 1%, chflags solves the problem in 5 seconds)
Honestly - I've always been terrified whenever I've been asked for my password during installation (I do a gut check every time an ARQ upgrades asks me for my password - "Do I trust them one more time? Well, they are my backup software, so, ...) - What if it's dropping something in my system directory?
I usually follow up with a cd /; sudo find -cmin -5 to see if things look reasonable - but I'm guess not all users do that. Also - with all the extended attr stuff on OS X, it's not even clear that a find -cmin -5 would be sufficient.
So - count me in the group that is really, really pleased that Apple is locking down those system directories by default.
Sorry, but I can't resist mentioning that there's no need for that `cd /`; `sudo find / -cmin -5` would work just fine.
> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
(though personally I'm not sure why you were downvoted originally)
This is a good feature, and it's not a new one: the BSDs have done it for over a decade with securelevels and immutable mounts --- where you also had to take the system down to make alterations.
If you think about it for a second, you'll see that anything that would have allowed you, a normal user typing at the keyboard, to create directories under /usr would probably render the security of SIP meaningless. It's the fact that you do have to go into recovery mode to hack up your filesystem that indicates that there's actually a meaningful security check happening here.
Just think of SIP's filesystem protections as literally just being "you have to boot the system into a special mode to change certain parts of the filesystem". I want that feature, and I hack up my filesystem all the time! The overwhelming majority of Mac users don't even know they want the feature and benefit enormously from it regardless. A major win.