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Digging into Apple's OS X 10.5.7 update

14.05.2009
Tuesday's release of , the latest update to the Leopard operating system, weighed in at 449MB on my MacBook Pro; the (which will update any version of OS X 10.5 to 10.5.7) is a whopping 729MB. Even on a super-fast , it took about a few minutes to download the update, and quite a few more minutes to install--it seems that the "writing files" step takes longer and longer with each update.

After waiting through the install phase and requisite reboot, my machine came up in 10.5.7, ready for use. On the surface, there's nothing visually different about this update. Apple notes only a few changes that may be noticeable at a glance--more RAW image support, better video playback and cursor movement on recent Nvidia-powered Macs, and the ability to grant non-admin users to add and remove printers via the Parental Controls System Preferences panel.

Most of the changes here are below the surface, and as you'd expect with a nearly half-gigabyte update, widespread. To see what Apple has modified, I dug into the update's BOM file (for more on BOM files; see this ; in 10.5.x, you'll find the BOM files in the /Library -> Receipts -> boms folder).

The list of programs touched by this updater is large, though not all get new version numbers (indicating the changes are very minor). Here's what's been updated, based on the BOM file, and the new version number if applicable; if not shown, it's unchanged from 10.5.6: Address Book (4.1.2), Automator (2.0.3), Dashboard, DVD Player, Exposé, Front Row, iCal (3.0.7), iChat (4.0.8), Mail (3.6), Preview (4.2), Safari 4 Beta, Spaces, Time Machine, Bluetooth File Exchange (2.1.6), RAID Utility (1.0.3), Remote Install Mac OS X, System Profiler (10.5.7; this is updated each cycle), Terminal (2.0.2), and X11. Whew, that's quite a list!

Note that if you have Safari 4 Beta installed, after upgrading to 10.5.7, you should run Software Update again. When you do, you'll see a separate 31.8MB Safari 4 Beta update. Run this updater (which will require another restart) to patch Safari 4 Beta against these known . After running this update, the build number of Safari 4 Beta (visible in the Safari -> About Safari dialog) will be 5528.17.

What's most surprising about the number of modified applications is that very few of those are mentioned on --only Dashboard, Time Machine, iCal and Mail are directly called out, but none of the rest. Although the BOM file makes it simple to see exactly which files were modified within an application, this doesn't necessarily help figure out exactly what the purpose of the change was.