Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 10:45 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by torquay
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

I've found that OS X is more annoying to deal with upgrades than any other system (Windows "never" breaks, Linux is stable where we're concerned for the most part and there are canary distros anyways, and no one else really updates in the first place). For example, 10.9 introduced the wonderful behavior where the library loader uses a statically sized array to store the library path (it was dynamic before). We overflowed this and now our app breaks. The solution has been to add support into the build to "bundle" libraries together, which was wanted anyways, but being forced to it because Apple regressed on some stupid internal thing which worked just fine is a pain in the ass. This happens all the time, every release.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 14:34 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (1 responses)

Totally agree. I wonder how much the people praising Mac OS really develop/support/maintain software that run on Mac OS or iOS? Not only does Apple not seem to care much about backward compatibility, but they are extremely aggressive about pushing updates so it's almost impossible to get a stable and consistent environment across a team of developers; code that builds and runs fine on one developer's system throws errors on another. Keeping software building and running properly on Mac OS/iOS is a never-ending treadmill for developers, IME.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 17:11 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Keeping software building and running properly on Mac OS/iOS is a never-ending treadmill for developers, IME.

I'm heavily involved with Gutenprint, and it is not an exaggeration to say that every major OSX release has broken (oh, sorry, "incompatibly changed") something we depended on.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 3, 2014 9:08 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting. Where your path names longer than PATH_MAX?

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 3, 2014 11:32 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Nowhere. There are just 200+ shared objects in the bundle which overflows it (they're all concatenated into a single buffer of libraries to look at).