Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 0:40 UTC (Mon) by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
In reply to: Bison 3.3 released by ballombe
Parent article: Bison 3.3 released

As far as I can tell, most FSF command line tools in macos are whatever was more or less stable in 2006, presumably (hopefully, I wouldn't bet real money on it...) with subsequent patches from apple. A couple of things (bash, emacs...) are 2007 snapshots. If you're stuck on macos and you need FSF tools, I'd suggest homebrew, since apple threw out the freebsd package manager.

Actually, if you need FSF tools I'd advise avoiding macos entirely, but you may be (as I am) stuck using it because it is the only point of access to a platform that pays the bills.

Although if anyone knows how to do iOS dev on a Linux box, I'm all ears...

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 8:38 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (4 responses)

As far as I can tell, most FSF command line tools in macos are whatever was more or less stable in 2006

$ curl -s https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.3.tar.bz2 | tar xjOf - bison-2.3/COPYING | head -n 2
		    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
		       Version 2, June 1991
$ curl -s https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2 | tar xjOf - bison-2.4/COPYING | head -n 2
                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                       Version 3, 29 June 2007

Apple ships the last version released under GPLv2. Apple seems allergic to GPLv3 for some reason.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 8:55 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

I noticed that too (I think it was during that shellshock thing).

I always told people that this must be Steve Jobs's ghost haunting Apple. It still can't get over that GCC/Objective-C thing back then in NeXT times (I worked in a strange shop, where the desktop folks were Apple acolytes and the backend folks Windows worshippers).

Of course this was in jest, but sometimes I think companies do develop traits which are somehow similar to those people develop -- pathologies and all.

I'd say GPL phobia. GPLV2 they've to put up with (but they shell out quite a bit of money to get rid of that too), but GPLV3... nono. That's too much ;-)

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 17:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Lots of other companies have similar restrictions. For example, no consumer Amazon device ships with GPLv3.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 13:44 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

If they do not want to upgrade it, at least they could stop shipping it entirely.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 16:05 UTC (Mon) by zwol (guest, #126152) [Link]

Exactly. As of the original release of GPLv3, Apple's legal department believed that if they shipped any code under that license, they would have to make it possible for end users to install third-party patches to the core of iOS, because of the "anti-tivoization" language. So they didn't, and they still don't.

Source: I used to work for a company that had a contract from Apple to do maintenance on their fork of GCC. Right around the time the FSF started to circulate GPLv3 drafts for comment, Apple canceled our contract and plowed all the money into LLVM instead. This was the unofficial explanation they gave our sales lead.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 15:29 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

I do pretty much all my actual development on Linux. I find it much easier to work with Windows and macOS by having a minimally viable editor available and git on the target machine. I'll test small fixes on the target machine, but bigger development is done in my main env and pushed around using git.

> Although if anyone knows how to do iOS dev on a Linux box, I'm all ears...

I almost had a cross-compilation setup done in 2008 or so by extracting an SDK and a using a cross compiling GCC. Ended up abandoning since I ended up just not caring about macOS at some point. Swift works on Linux now (and I suspect you could get a cross-compile capable setup pretty easily since it is LLVM-based), so that may be one way to do at least compile testing. Making the final package is probably always going to be on a macOS instance though since, AFAIK, the signing tools are macOS-specific. I assume Clang compiles Obj-C, so that may work as well.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 29, 2019 10:34 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (1 responses)

I followed the same path trying to develop for MacOS and gave up after a couple of working prototypes.

It just wasn't worth the effort trying to maintain a completely separate path that, without running the entire compilation on an up-to-date MacOS itself, wouldn't do even the simplest of things.

And I'm not prepared to pay Apple hardware prices just to run my own code.

I would have to say that, even if I made a living developing software, I would not even try to support Apple devices purely because of the developer interfaces. I am actually surprised that any developer does bother, to be honest. They can't be doing so willingly, surely (I get the "But we MUST have an iPad app" kind of forced development).

Pretty much the only way I could ever get anything to work reliably was to push XCode tools into Eclipse (which "just works" on Windows and Linux of several flavours) and run it natively on MacOS. Then, literally every time MacOS updated, compilation on un-updated machines would fail or apps couldn't be signed because things weren't up to date, which involved an OS update, which - after a while - required a hardware update.

And XCode doesn't work on any other platform, so you couldn't even go that way and just teach yourself that and move it to Windows/Linux.

Apple went out of their way to tell me that they don't want me using their platform. I took the hint, before I'd ever parted with a penny on anything they offered.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 29, 2019 21:57 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> I am actually surprised that any developer does bother, to be honest. They can't be doing so willingly, surely (I get the "But we MUST have an iPad app" kind of forced development).

There's apparently lots of money to be had. People do lots of crazy things to get more of it.

But, I understand the sentiment.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 19:08 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

Homebrew is great. Cannot be on MacOS without it