[ic] Mac OSX viable as a development platform?

Chris Devers interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Tue Mar 5 23:19:01 2002


Taking this offlist, as it stopped having anything
to do with Interchange a whole ago... 

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Robert Brandtjen wrote:

> On Tuesday 05 March 2002 06:46 pm, Chris Devers wrote:
> > ...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.
>
> Umm - you apparently arent aware that, if anything, the ORIGINAL OSX
> (1.x)  was a direct NEXt/Openstep port, and as such was even more
> "unixy" as was it's user base. 

Are you always this condescending? No, I never had the chance to use the
system back then, but I am aware of that. Thanks though, teach'.

> >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...
> 
> System wide @INC needs to be written to as root - for whatever reason,
> sudo doesn't cut the mustard - maybe that you still only have access to
> certain directories that your admin account has access to, in any case,
> it installs when logged in as root. 

Is this 1.x era received wisdom, or does it still hold? I started using
OSX with the Public Beta, and haven't noticed an error like this with
sudo. I'm happy to be contradicted here, if you can give a current example
of the behavior you're describing. 
 
> >...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
> >ike having it around was causing as many errors as it was avoiding...
> 
> Well, anything that needs a case sensitive aware file system is going to 
> choke with out it - I know many on the Mac Lists think all of OSS should 
> instead "fix" their apps to not need case insensitivity - but its not likely 
> to happen anytime soon - see 'Makefile" and "makefile" on OSX 10 - there are 
> one and the same, not so on a UFS or EXt2/EXT3FS.

...thanks, but this answer was a little too abstract to be helpful. In the
current context of trying to install Interchange, will the case
sensitivity issue be severe enough to warrant reformatting a partition and
destroying all the data stored on it? I am well aware of the abstract
issues involved in case sensitive filesystems; I'm still not clear whether
or not these issues are going to be a problem for this task.
 
> >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
> >nto getting that running Linux that the iMac. Setting up a functional
> >installation of X-Windows just isn't my idea of a good time... :) 
> 
> Hmm - well, on my box, I type at prompt "Xconfigurator" and then I point
> and click at a few options, log out, restartx and voila - YMMV. In
> otherwords, no different then using the Mac Monitors control panel. 

...except that the Mac, well, Just Worked -- Out Of the Box. It's nice to
hear that the X config scripts are getting easier to work with, but
they're still not automatic or transparent, as IMO they should be.
 
> If you mean an install of RH or YDL, well, I install the CD, reboot,
> click on full Install, and set up a root account and an admin account,
> set up my networking ( easier then OSX, actually) then wait till it asks
> me for disk 2 - takes about 30 minutes - then I reboot.

Well then the systems have come a long way since I was last doing this. 
Last week I spent a solid day trying to get Debian running on a spare PC,
and the procedure -- including a dozen abortive attempts at getting X
configured and many dozens of half-successful attempts to grab the .deb
packages of the cd-rom -- it still only half functional. To be fair, I
think some of the hardware could be faulty (it also couldn't get a copy of
FreeBSD or RedHat working properly), but efforts to put the same software
on a known good PC didn't have more luck, so Debian isn't off the hook.

Further -- and again, this may have changed -- every Linux installer I've
seen forces you to know *way* too much information about your hardware.
Install BeOS on the same box and everything will Just Work (well, aside
from the fact that diverse hardware support was never a strong point for 
BeOS...). 10 minutes later and you're up & running. OSX isn't quite that
fast, but it isn't any more difficult. 

> No registration necessary - RH does't phone home like OSX, er ET.

[a] Who says OSX calls home, unless you're running a service (such as NTP
    or Software Update) that explicitly tries to do so?
[b] So what if it does? Are you maybe thinking of WinXP here, with it's
    activation system? I'll agree, that's bad, but OSX isn't doing 
    anything like that. Admit it, you're just trolling here...

> How was your install of OSX10?

Went without a hitch, thanks for asking. 



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