Comment by mrweasel
2 years ago
I don't disagree with the tool part and the article is about Apple breaking grep, so fair enough.
My point is that this mostly doesn't happen, yet some people manages to build workflows that for one reason or another gets locked to specific versions of an OS. In my experience that's actually pretty hard to do. The only obvious examples I can think of is the Python 3 migration (which is perhaps why that took years longer than it should have) and certain security related issues.
Maybe it's due to the way some think about computers, maybe it's just bad luck, maybe computers just never change that dramatically for the tooling I use. From the outside it just looks like people go out of their way to lock themselves in, in ways the developers and engineers never imagined or advised.
I love to know more precisely what it is that keeps breaking in the case of this astrophysicist, because I'm betting it's not Emacs. Realistically it's one or more highly specialized programs which has been poorly written and/or packaged badly, if packaged at all.
Perhaps this is not true for the astrophysicist, but my general experience with the systems of people who experience frequent upgrade-induced-breakage is that they change the system rather than working within it. Switch out things. Switch BSD utilities for GNU equivalents at the system level. Change the configuration of OS services that were never designed to be changed. Do simple looking, but actually really invasive, ‘QOL’ hacks that they found on StackOverflow and the like.
macOS’s SIP is designed to combat malware - but it’s also designed to stop people shooting themselves in the foot by doing things like this.
Note that I’m not trying to make the argument that modifying your system should be _impossible_ to do - I’m sure someone will cry out about ‘software freedom’ - but I do think that some people do it without understanding the consequences.
Generally, it’s possible to customize your user environment without delving into OS internals. To a large degree, even - for example, on Mac Homebrew has, in recent years at least, become very good at this. And my experience, at least, is that if you don’t mess with the underlying _system_, OS upgrades proceed smoothly.