It's not often that we get "official" final bits before Apple pushes the big red button that releases them to the public. I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to do the testing we need to do here before the email starts coming in, wondering when we're going to support the latest-and-greatest.
Well, sure, I guess I can tell you. It's nice. Really nice. Really, really nice. Thank you, Apple!
Wewease Bwian!
Because we've been able to test, I'm pleased to be able to provide those of you out there with the Release Candidate of SuperDuper! 2.8 as well. This has some minor changes as compared to the last update, based on the latest changes to El Capitan. It's nearly identical to what we're going to release next week to the public.
Not that you're not the public. Just that you're special, since you're reading this, and they're not.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
The main change is in our updater. Every task in SuperDuper is controlled by what we call a Transcript. The transcript coördinates the various parts of our code, Unix command-line tools, shell scripting, etc, to perform a task. One of those tasks is performing an auto-update.
Our automatic updater was one of the first out there, so it has a long history. And way back in the before time, OS X had a tendency to mess up permissions to certain folders when packages were installed. So, to help users out, our upgrade transcript fixed permissions for the Applications and Applications/Utilities folders.
The need for this diminished over the years, much like the need for repairing permissions, and we probably could have removed it. But it never hurt anything, and never caused a problem, so we didn't revisit the code.
Beta n
Of course, "never caused a problem" doesn't mean "never will cause a problem".
In a late Beta of El Capitan, "never caused" was automatically updated to "now causes", because changes to ownership and permissions for those folders (even if changed to the same values) became illegal...and that caused our transcript to fail.
We've fixed that in this update. But that fix isn't in the current version of SuperDuper, it's in version 2.8... which means users need to upgrade to 2.8 before they install El Capitan, or install manually.
We've adjusted the messaging in the update message to say this, so hopefully it won't be a big problem. But it won't be a problem for you because, again, special!
Wrapping up
That's about it! There are some other minor changes, but nothing to get worked up about. I think you'll find this version runs quite smoothly.
Thanks to all of you for your help and patience while testing these releases, and thanks to everyone who reported problems.
