10.4: Ignore Ownership?

I noticed this new feature in OS X 10.4, there is now an option to ‘Ignore Ownership on this Volume’. While working on a project that involved changing permissions, I was having trouble since no errors were being reporting from the functions that were changing the permissions, but the permissions were not being changed. I finally figured out that it was the Ignoring Ownership ‘feature’ that was causing this problem. As far as I can tell changing ownership on a file/folder in a volume that has that enabled will not really change the permissions, and no error will be reported. I dont understand what the point of this ‘feature’ is, but now I understand were my confusion in this permission problem was coming from! 🙂