Permissions for Developer Tools

Question

I installed the Developer Tools on three Macs I bought for my students to try. The setup is with three basic accounts: Admin; Graham (Standard account for my use); and Student. The latter is a Managed account.
I have found in the Managed account that trying to open any of the applications in the Developer package brings up a "insufficient privileges" warning. I am reluctant to give the students increased access privileges (and Admin is certainly out) as they are (of course) inquisitive and will push things if they can. It is possible for me to use the programs in my Standard account.
I had a look at the Finder permissions for a few of the files but even when I undid the padlock, I was unable (in Admin) to change the Student account to anything that would allow use.
Is there a way to allow access to these utilities by changing permissions, or am I going to have to change that account to a Standard one, with possible risk?

Answer 1

"I had a look at the Finder permissions for a few of the files but even when I undid the padlock, I was unable (in Admin) to change the Student account to anything that would allow use."
How much time did you waste doing this? I say wasted because "permissions" have nothing to do with why the "managed" user can't use those applications in this situation - that dialogue is an example of a poor choice of words by the GUI designers, right up there with calling "login items" "Startup items" prior to "Tiger" (not to be confused with "StartupItems"), referring to a file owned by a uid that doesn't have a corresponding local user as being owned by "(unknown)" (not to be confused with the user "unknown" uid=99), and don't get me started about "Name", "realname", "Short Name", "name"...
Rant aside, "Michael Conniff" is correct - applications may be approved for use by a "managed" user by selecting them in the "Accounts" pref pane. The selected apps are recorded in 'mcx_settings' in "NetInfo", and represented only by eg. their 'CFBundleIdentifier', or else a string derived from their "creator code". The programme's "path" is not important.
It seems that only items in "/Applications" or "/Applications/Utilities" are presented in the "checkable" list in the "Accounts" pref pane, so the "Developer" apps can be made to appear there if their enclosing folder is temporarily to "/Applications" (they can be moved back after the apps are selected because the "path" is unimportant). Neither an "alias" nor a "symbolic link" to the developer apps folder seems to work. However, an alias to an app itself will appear in the list, so an alternative would be to place a folder full of aliases in the "/Applications" folder. A folder full of aliases can be prepared by searching in "/Developer" for items whose "Kind" is "Application", selecting "All" in the search results list, and dragging the items to a folder while holding down the "command" (⌘) and "option" (⌥) keys.