[ic] Mac OSX viable as a development platform?

Robert Brandtjen interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Tue Mar 5 22:24:02 2002


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.

OSX 1.x (rhapsody) debuted in 1996 - not the fall of 2000 - that was OSX 10 
"Echs" - other wise known as rhapsody 1.3 (uname -r)

>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.

>...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.

>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.

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

How was your install of OSX10?
-- 
 Robert Brandtjen
 --------------------------------------
 Web Site Creation and Hosting Services
 Hostmaster@prometheusmedia.com
 www.prometheusmedia.com