040hosting

You’d be making a pretty big gaff if you assumed that. 90%? Find me stats that 90% of WordPress users are on suphp

I never said this; i said the developer should look for another way to check the permissions as just assuming that 777 is necessary. Also i never said 90% of wordpress users are using suphp, i said Shared-hosting providers are using is 90% of the time because on a shared environment you frankly do not want anything else, unless you like others to read/adjust your files whenever it pleases them. That there are situations you rather choose not to use it; i of course understand.

The option you’re given is either set it 777 OR make the changes yourself. If you set it 777, it tells you to change settings to something more secure

That is not true; in a suphp environment the developer does NOT need to change the rights on the file because PHP does not run under the webserver account but under the users account as it should be from the start anyways. This also means you do not need (nor allowed) to use 777 permissions. 90% of the shared-hosting solutions are using suphp as it also makes it much easier to find which processes are abusing systems as each process runs at the users account.

If you are on a shared-hosting solution NOT using suphp you should be aware of the security implications this has. That said; this thread is about how the error is given by the developer; where the developer did not look to other (much used) options. If the developer likes to learn more he is more as welcome to discuss this with me.

I changed it back after install. Worked fine.

Of course that works; but its wrong to need to do so. Not to mention dangerous for those who forget to change it back. Besides if you have over 500 blogs this would mean a lot of extra work to upgrade.

If the developer needs some more understanding or test environments he can contact me.

The check/update doesnt look to work very well either; changing a .htaccess to 777 is not done on a suphp system nor needed. A lot of wordpress users are using shared hosting with suphp which does not need any change of file permissions. Checking file permissions to see if you can edit a .htaccess file is a bad way to check.