Common Lisp for Mac OS X
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From: Tim Bradshaw on 29 May 2010 19:38 On 2010-05-29 18:33:58 +0100, Harald Hanche-Olsen said: > Appl's X11 support after the release of Leopard was a disaster. I think you mean "X11 was a disaster" don't you?
From: Andrew Reilly on 29 May 2010 21:19 On Sun, 30 May 2010 00:36:34 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote: > On 2010-05-29 02:48:34 +0100, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > >> Honestly, the unix system under the MacOSX facade feels like it's held >> together with tape and spit > > Tape and spit is how Unix systems are meant to be held together. While completely true, I think that as a Unix, MacOSX holds together better than most of the other commercial Unixes I've used over the years. (Except VAX Ultrix, which was very nearly just BSD4.x) SunOS 4 and earlier were similar, but slightly weird (especially once NeWS and X were thrown in), and have got stranger since 5. That's not to say it is as coherent a Unix as, say, FreeBSD or Debian, but there are disparate forces at work. I wish that one of the BSDs would bite the bullet and move to launchd as system daemon herder, instead of the (nicely tuned, highly pedigreed) anarchic mess that is rc.d. >> every time you get an update of MacOSX, you have to reinstall X11, >> because it botches some library or something. > > The best thing about macs is that you can finally get away from the > tentacled horror that is X11. Just as it's starting to become interesting, with vector drawing libraries that are finally attaining the competence of Acorn's Draw module, circa 1988, or Display Postscript circa 1990... Cheers, -- Andrew
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 30 May 2010 06:35 Andrew Reilly <areilly---(a)bigpond.net.au> writes: > On Sun, 30 May 2010 00:36:34 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote: > >> On 2010-05-29 02:48:34 +0100, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: >> >>> Honestly, the unix system under the MacOSX facade feels like it's held >>> together with tape and spit >> >> Tape and spit is how Unix systems are meant to be held together. > > While completely true, I think that as a Unix, MacOSX holds together > better than most of the other commercial Unixes I've used over the > years. (Except VAX Ultrix, which was very nearly just BSD4.x) SunOS 4 > and earlier were similar, but slightly weird (especially once NeWS and X > were thrown in), and have got stranger since 5. > > That's not to say it is as coherent a Unix as, say, FreeBSD or Debian, > but there are disparate forces at work. > > I wish that one of the BSDs would bite the bullet and move to launchd as > system daemon herder, instead of the (nicely tuned, highly pedigreed) > anarchic mess that is rc.d. > >>> every time you get an update of MacOSX, you have to reinstall X11, >>> because it botches some library or something. >> >> The best thing about macs is that you can finally get away from the >> tentacled horror that is X11. > > Just as it's starting to become interesting, with vector drawing > libraries that are finally attaining the competence of Acorn's Draw > module, circa 1988, or Display Postscript circa 1990... Well Display Postscript is insupperable, but Apple ditched it. Therefore X11 is the only one that has the essential feature for me to be able to display remotely. Moreover, ratpoison (and similar window manager) run only in X11, not on Aqua, AFAIK. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
From: Tim Bradshaw on 31 May 2010 06:55 On 2010-05-30 02:19:07 +0100, Andrew Reilly said: > While completely true, I think that as a Unix, MacOSX holds together > better than most of the other commercial Unixes I've used over the > years. (Except VAX Ultrix, which was very nearly just BSD4.x) SunOS 4 > and earlier were similar, but slightly weird (especially once NeWS and X > were thrown in), and have got stranger since 5. > > That's not to say it is as coherent a Unix as, say, FreeBSD or Debian, > but there are disparate forces at work. > I wish that one of the BSDs would bite the bullet and move to launchd as > system daemon herder, instead of the (nicely tuned, highly pedigreed) > anarchic mess that is rc.d. From my perspective, it smells like a BSD, which is good as I grew up with BSD systems. Launchd is a huge improvement over init scripts of any kind (for instance it's really nice that non-privileged users can have their own things that wake up when the log in, and it's got the nice cron-like thing (that some cron's have too now) of being able to run something once a day, even if the machine was asleep at the scheduled time, which is very nice for backups and log rolling. Launchd I think isn't as nice as Sun's SMF could be (no dependency graph), but Sun fouled up the implementation of SMF in various ways. Packages are not as nice as Debianoid systems (you can't remove them, there may be no dependency system), but OK. To counter that, most things just run from their *.app directory. You don't get to spend half your life making it work on whatever flaky random crapness using an x86 system involves this week. Strangely, I don't miss that. Because it is a commercial system there is a refreshing absence of whining ideologues[1], though you tend to get a different sort of annoying people[2] to make up for it. Apple seem no more and no less unpleasant than other companies that size (though the recent flash thing gives me pause there). --tim [1] Yes, I know, making sure you only use the right kind of license is so much more important than, say, dealing with starving people or global warming. [2] Yes, I know, design is more important life.
From: Tamas K Papp on 31 May 2010 08:48
On Mon, 31 May 2010 11:55:54 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote: > You don't get to spend half your life making it work on whatever flaky > random crapness using an x86 system involves this week. Strangely, I > don't miss that. That's interesting to hear. I got a new Dell laptop in September. Put the latest Ubuntu on a USB stick, and installed it in less than 30 minutes. Everything was working fine for the first time (and I had to admit, this surprised me quite a bit, I have been using Linux for a long time and it wasn't always this nice). > Because it is a commercial system there is a refreshing absence of > whining ideologues[1], though you tend to get a different sort of > annoying people[2] to make up for it. > > Apple seem no more and no less unpleasant than other companies that size > (though the recent flash thing gives me pause there). I had an Apple laptop around 2004-2005. It was still the Power CPU series. I bought it in the US, and tried using OS X for about 5 months, putting up with every annoying thing (standard Unix and X11 tools were tolerated, but not nicely supported, Emacs was either quirky X11 or alpha Aquamacs, etc). Then I went to Europe for a few weeks, and tried to watch a DVD I rented there. I was told that I can change the region setting - but only a total of 5 times. I got very angry with Apple then: I paid big bucks for this laptop, and they are telling me what I can do with it? Next day, I started running good old Debian on it. But then it was just an overpriced PC with a different CPU architecture :-) I got rid of it in a year or so. I am under the impression that Apple's approach to total control hasn't got any better since. So I am staying away from their products for practical reasons -- I would go crazy if I paid big $$$ for something which then tried to impose be arbitrary limitations on me. Maybe that's just me, and more patient people can put up with Apple nicely. Tamas |