Somehow it looks to me, like Apple is fixing everything about MacOSX except those things that annoy me the most *g* Being a developer guess what’s bothering me ;) Broken programs bundled with MacOSX. Just to name a few problems:
- Broken Ruby libraries and components:
- Now readline support for irb
- mkmf appears to be completely broken (dying right away with “Can’t find header files”)
- Other build-system related stuff mentioned for example here
- Broken Python libraries as described here
As long as “updating” Ruby and Python to actually working setups is a easy as running port install ruby python24 I don’t really care all that much, but the situation gets a little bit more complicated if you don’t just problem for you and yourself as customer but for other people out there. Is really everyone running a self-compiled or fink/DarwinPorts-based Ruby/Python? I somehow doubt that. But thanks to Apple’s obvious lack of motivation to fix those quite well known issues I simply don’t see a realy option here. If there is a good reason for not fixing these things I’d really love to here it :)
Sorry, if this sounds a little bit edgy but that’s exactly how I’m currently feeling. Failing to install a Ruby application and then in the end noticing that a part of the core library is causing the problem here is quite annoying.
Now I just hope, that switching to the DarwinPorts version of Ruby will actually solve all of my problems. Ok, I will have to re-install all my gems and remove the old ones from the /usr prefix. It somehow still doesn’t get less annoying ;) And can you really expect your users to use not the version of a base component that is actually bundled with their operating system but manually update? And yes, IMO having to install a 3rd-party software repository like fink or DarwinPorts just to be able to the update qualifies as “manual” for me ;)
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂