[ic] Mac OSX viable as a development platform?

[Chris Devers]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Robert Brandtjen wrote:

> I am, as far as I know, the only person ever to get it to work on OSX
> 1.2 as well as the new OSX 10.x. - most people have some of it working
> but not all of it. No one on the OSX admin lists were helpful - in fact,
> they were down right hostile toward the notion of open source software
> at all and refused to help - but that was nearly two years ago. 

...was this back in Public Beta days? I suspect the Mac culture may have
evolved a bit since then -- there seems to be a big influx of Unix and
free/open software types using the platform these days. 

> the problems - some, anyway, arise from the use of HFS+ file system
> which is case insensitive. 

Hmm, ok. That led to problems with Apache too, leading to a custom module
with the default Apache installation that works around case insensitivity. 

> one of the problems you will also run into is OpenSSL which must be
> updated by Apple to run right - although there is a kludge available on
> stepwise.com. 

This I have installed via Fink -- OpenSSL 0.9.6b-1. Maybe it needs some
tweaking? I was hoping that, for simple prototyping, I could get by
without SSL support for now on the Mac.

> You should also install the perl mods as ROOT (as opposed to using sudo)
> before attemping the tar ball install - OSX doesn't seem to handle that
> part very well either.

Wow, really? I haven't noticed any problems with sudo -- what glitches
were you seeing? I've seen lots of bugs in the OSX version of Perl, but
none of them seemed related to the user account that installs things...

> next - on OSX 10.x you might consider making /usr/local a UFS partition

...how necessary is this step? I can see where it could help things, but I
don't have room (or, to be honest, much desire) to reformat one of my HFS+
partitions as UFS. I had a UFS partition for a while there, but it seemed
like having it around was causing as many errors as it was avoiding...

> Lastly - make sure you install as root and run makecat as root - being
> an admin will not work so you will have to enable the root account
> (turned off by default). 

...again, this is definitely preferred to sudo? If so, fine, but why?

> In httpd, you must set a proper cgi-bin directory/alias setting the
> virtual host container - OSX has screwy Apple methods rather then normal
> *nix conventions. 

Ok, I'll look this over...

> Lastly - attempt to do nothing out of the ordinary during install -
> choose the defaults for everything - except where unix vs inted is
> concerned, etc.

Ok, this is what I was trying before...

> Its alot easier to switch to YellowDog Linux 2.1- which is basically RH 7.2 
> on PPC.

Well maybe, but I'm really not interested in getting rid of OSX over this.
I've got a spare PC with a bad motherboard, and I'd rather put the time
into getting that running Linux that the iMac. Setting up a functional
installation of X-Windows just isn't my idea of a good time... :) 


-- 
Chris Devers                           chdevers@netscape.net
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/