[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2008, Mark Benson wrote:

>> This is not a big deal on OS X 10.5
>
> I'm so glad you have such boundless appreciation and trust for Apple 
> products, but I don't.

It's not so much trust as what I have investigated and what I can
demonstrate.  I only "trust" systems with data I have rsnapshotted (or
Time Machined).

> OS X has broken on all 3 machines I've run it on at least once, and
> never through any fault of my own (and yes, at least one was due to an
> update).

If it's not your fault, and the system fails despite treating the OS so
gingerly, that would seem to indicate that the failures are induced
randomly, and that you can't do much, if anything, to prevent them.

> Moreover OS X 10.5.x has been a whole wold of pain with bugs and
> glitches that I never had on previous versions. I'm losing faith in them
> very fast here.

OS X 10.5 is the worst version of OS X to ship, and Apple's responses to
the bugs I've filed on it do not thrill me.  Breaking POSIX permissions[0]
on SMB shares is marked "working as intended".  I have four or five others
that haven't even been touched, as far as I can tell.

10.5.5 is the first release of 10.5 that I, as a developer, would consider
signing my name to as something shippable.  And, even then, it's ".0"
quality at best.  The releases prior to 10.5.3 were just atrocious.

> I still love OS X but I've been very badly hurt by > NVIDIA drivers that
> still crash occasionally, a colour profile manager that seems to be
> permanently screwed and a Mail.app that just hates me a lot of the time.
>
> I treat it with kid gloves so it has as little excuse to go wrong as 
> possible.

Whereas I apparently abuse all my Macs to next Tuesday and back, and,
apart from demonstrable bugs in the OS, they treat me just fine. :)

This'll really get to you: I've kept the same home directory since 10.1.
I've have the same crusty old ~/Library folder from my first
blue-and-white G3 (with an unsupported disk in the slave position on the
IDE bus) on my Mac Pro running Leopard.  The home directory on my laptop
isn't as old.  It only dates back to 2002 and Jaguar running on a Pismo.

The last major problems I've had were a bad interaction between VMware
Fusion and 10.5 that caused intermittent KPs under high load, and a very
intermittent USB bug that causes the Mac to lose the mouse cursor when a
USB device gets detached.  None of that can be attributed to treating the
system badly, unless using it is treating it badly.

> So when Rick refers to the File Allocation Table as a FAT he gets away
> with it, and when I do it you assume I'm referring to FATx filesystems
> used in Windows.

I didn't see his post, but you did mention it in the context of Windows
and MBRs, neither of which I've needed to do storage management on a
Mac.


[0] Quick test: Share a folder on your Mac via SMB.  Mount that share on a
     Windows box.  Save a new file in notepad to the share.  Note the
     permissions (0644).  Save a new file in Microsoft Word (XP, 2003, or
     2007) to the share.  Note the permissions (0000 + an ACL).  The POSIX
     permissions field does not inherit the effective ACL field (probably
     due to some difference in which APIs are used on the client side, but
     that's immaterial from the end user's perspective).  During certain
     sorts of manipulations (copying the file to a different volume,
     zipping/unzipping), the ACL is dropped, so you're left with a file you
     may neither read, nor write, nor delete without dropping to the
     command-line.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson