The upgrade to Snow Leopard left certain parts of my system non-functional. Not good considering that a number of these components are crucial to my development process. Here are the hacks/work-arounds I discovered restoring these services:
Subversion
Subversion running locally on my MacBook Pro requires that the Remote Login privilege be enabled to support svn+ssh secure tunneling mode. For some strange reason, the upgrade to OS X 10.6 disabled this privilege breaking my ability to connect to my subversion server. Luckily, my installation notes reminded me of this requirement and after a visit to System Preferences -> Sharing, I was able to restore access.
PostgreSQL
As I documented with my previous post, the custom PostgreSQL user I created to run the database was deleted by the upgrade. This oversight did not extend to the database installation itself, but recreating the user did not automatically restore database functionality. After a bit of digging around, it seems that my previous PostgreSQL user was assigned a different user id. A peek at the ownership privileges on the database files and directories revealed ownership permissions which did not correspond to a valid system user. A quick chmod -R fixed the permission problem and allowed PostgreSQL to be started correctly.
Fink Commander
I've been using Fink Commander to manage packages I've installed on my system over the last two versions of OS X and encountered no obvious upgrade problems when migrating to newer versions of OS X. This changed with Snow Leopard. After upgrading to 10.6, I noticed that despite having updated Fink via the command line, Fink Commander refused to display any package information. Despite an exhaustive search when I first upgraded to Snow Leopard, I was thwarted; I had no clue how to fix this issue. Jump forward a few months and it seems that I was not alone: a solution was finally posted. Due to the number of different perl binaries packaged with OS X, an explicit path to the older perl binaries was required. Under Fink Commander 0.5.5, this path can be set by navigating to Preferences -> Paths -> Paths to Perl. For OS X 10.6, this value should be /usr/bin/perl5.8.9. The original post can be found here.
Mysteries solved.
