[m463]

I think apple fundamentally does not understand containers.

All the interesting container stuff is on other platforms.

It might be out of fear, maybe because apple doesn't want macos to be virtualized.

It would be really nice to have say the current xcode in one container and a dev xcode in another. It would be nice to farm work out to a lot of machines.

or a dockerfile like: FROM macos:10.14

RUN installer xcode... RUN xcode-build myproject

[eropple]

> I think apple fundamentally does not understand containers.

Given that Apple is (or at least was) one of the biggest users of Mesos in the world and have invited me to interview specifically on the back of the operationalization of containers, I'm guessing that the staggeringly bright programmers they've got probably understand containers.

Just a little hunch, you know?

[m463]

The devops guys need to spread the love to the OS group and ship it with the OS.

Maybe it's another "you're not the target market" kind of thing.

The point I'm getting at is that folks on other platforms have lots and lots of options and apple doesn't provide any.

[saagarjha]

> apple doesn't want macos to be virtualized.

The macOS EULA explicitly allows macOS to be virtualized if you do it on a Mac running macOS.

> It would be really nice to have say the current xcode in one container and a dev xcode in another.

This is the entire point behind xcode-select. I currently have Xcode-beta and Xcode on side-by-side on my machine, and they pretty much coexist.

[eropple]

Can you run them simultaneously? I've never tried.

[plorkyeran]

Yes, but there are some issues. For pure macOS development it's usually fine, but anything touching the simulator breaks if multiple versions of Xcode try to use it at the same time. I quickly got in the habit of always exiting Xcode before starting a different version.

[m463]

- "allows" not the same as supports.

- I think xcode-select just modifies a .plist.

[saagarjha]

It changes a symlink at /var/db/xcode_select_link, and all of the development tool stubs that Apple has placed consult this to see which binary to run. This is pretty much the officially supported way to switch between multiple copies of Xcode.

[toyg]

Containers lose a lot of appeal once you leave the server, and Apple have explicitly abandoned the server market.

They do offer a set of "primitives" for virtualization, which can be hooked into by third-party solutions like Docker if they want to do so.