[gempir]

This is really weird thing to complain about.

When your partner builds her entire dev environment against a very specific version, packages etc. and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version? If you don't put any effort into using containers, vms or even just basic setup scripts then yeah this will not work out.

I've worked with a few physicists and they are scientists first and developers second. Which is okay, but will lead to janky setups that you cannot simply upgrade the OS under.

I want actual updates of my OS and don't want to be stuck forever on some specific version of openssh because some Astrophysicist decides to built her dev environment against it.

So either build a reproducible dev environment or don't complain that you cannot update without issues.

[impendia]

I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

[pdimitar]

I am a programmer with 22 years of practice and I stand with you.

The churn gets very tiring at one point and you begin to suspect that the people who impose it on you actually have no clue what they're doing and are taking the easy way out because they want to clock out for the week. Which I do understand but pretending that it's for the good of everyone is obviously bogus.

IMO all you scientist folks should work closely with a few programmers and sysadmins and have them author you tools to bring up and down various environments. It's easy and it's much more churn-proof than what we currently do.

I am still in the process of authoring a script to bring up my dev environment everywhere I go, I need to iron out a few kinks in the initial bootstrap (as in, OS and Linux-distro specific ways to install several critically important tools before installing everything else) and I'll just provision a few laptops at home and a VM in the cloud and be done with it.

It's annoying but ultimately a worth investment. Look into it and ask your dev friends.

[hulitu]

> I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

> In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

> In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

Those are the problem with SW developers: they don't have a concept of a finished product and (some of them) never finish the product.

[dharmab]

Because our software is generally not deployed into "finished" environments. Even the Voyager probes get software updates to deal with their changing environments and hardware!

[tpmoney]

I think this is somewhat unfair. Software doesn’t “require” maintenance anymore than anything else does. If you’re happy with the state of the world as it exists at the moment in time you create the software, it will continue to run that way for as long as you have working hardware to run it on. A compiled application on a computer with a frozen set of software is just as permanent as any academic paper.

The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates, and that requires changes which in turn creates maintenance.

Software maintenance is less comparable to a single academic paper than it is to the entire field of academia. Sure Freud's papers are all exactly as they were when he published, but if you want to be in the field of psychology you’re going to have a bad time if that’s the most recent version of your academic “software stack”

[impendia]

From what I've read on HN, software certainly requires maintenance if you're hoping that others will buy or use what you've developed. That's the comparison I'm trying to make.

> The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates

I agree, from what I can tell. Personally I'd prefer that software UI not change nearly as often as it does, but I concede that I'm apparently in the minority.

[ansonhoyt]

Perhaps if the software is more isolated? Many good points here, and I absolutely can avoid a lot of maintenance by my choice of languages and libraries, BUT just being online (or even on-network) forces quite a bit of maintenance.

I'm generally writing web apps, requiring me to keep up with a stream of security updates just to stay online: browsers deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1 [1], browsers require TLS certificates to be renewed ~annually, languages only fix security vulnerabilities for the last few releases, etc. Even linux kernels are getting shorter support going forward. [3]

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/237688/when-wil...

[2] https://www.digicert.com/faq/public-trust-and-certificates/h...

[3] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-kernel-reduction-...

[tpmoney]

I feel like all of this falls under "people don't want stuff to stay the same". Being online at all is a commitment to being in an ever changing environment, especially with respect to security and encryption. Fixing security vulnerabilities is declining to accept software as it is. Likewise, kernel support only matters if you're upgrading the hardware. To use an extreme example, you can (provided the hardware itself is still working) take a C64 from the 80's, plug it into the wall and use it as if it were 1984 all day long. Everything will work just fine. You might not be able to connect to any BBS anymore, but that isn't because the software required changes or maintenance to keep working, but because society itself changed and no one offers a C64 compatible dial-up BBS. To bring it to a physical analogy again, your 1950's encyclopedia set won't have anything to say about the internet or cellular technology, but that's not because your encyclopedia doesn't work any more, it's because the world around it has changed.

[droopyEyelids]

Formal mathematics is the ONLY aspect of human life where you can get something “right” and it doesnt change.

Supremely unrealistic expectation anywhere else

[KolenCh]

I think you missed the point of reproducibility. If a stack is maintained with the mindset of reproducibility, then it will do exactly what you said, that it will never change and always works and don’t need to be maintained.

If the software stack is reproducible, then you decouple that to the environment and hence upgrading the OS shouldn’t break it.

(That said it is very difficult to be 100% reproducible, eg your hardware can change from x64 to arm64… that’s why people are suggesting docker. I don’t like docker in the sense that it is a lazy approach to make things reproducible. But the guarantee there is very high.)

[lelanthran]

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

For science, not really - what use is the GP's partner's data if it cannot be reproduced?

I know, I know ... scientists go ahead and publish non-reproducible studies anyway, but it's widely acknowledged as bad science.

For scientists, containers seem to be a much more important than just about anything else, especially for publications, because reproducibility is at the core of the work being done.

[kazinator]

Hey I'm in the software world; you're describing the ignorant asshole software world.

[Reason077]

> "This is really weird thing to complain about."

What made you think the OP's post was a complaint? It seems reasonable to defer upgrades if you know they're going to break things and create a lot of extra admin work when you'd rather just be getting your job done.

I feel the same pain myself. Major macOS upgrades typically always break things, either in my dev environment or just by introducing bugs or breaking/removing/changing some random OS feature that I like using.

Its usually only Xcode which forces me to upgrade, since at some point in each release cycle Apple starts requiring the latest macOS for the latest Xcode, which in turn is required if you want to target/deploy to the latest iOS. If it wasn't for that I'd prefer to stick to one major version for 2-3 years.

[Suzuran]

Unacceptable. Deferring updates is always absolutely unacceptable. Security updates must always be given absolute priority over all other concerns. If security isn't breaking your workflow then your security is not extensive enough, and if security isn't your absolute top priority then you are doing security wrong. On the defensive side you are either perfect in your compliance or you are penetrated. This is an invariant. TLDR if security isn't breaking your workflow then your security isn't secure and you are part of the problem. You should be thankful when security stops you from working because that means your security is working.

[Reason077]

We're talking about major version updates, ie: going from Ventura (13.x) to Sonoma (14.x). Those are the ones that have signficant changes and tend to break things.

Apple does release maintenance and security updates for older macOS releases for several years (for example, Monterey 12.7.1 and Ventura 13.6.1 were both released in the past week or so). I always install those right away, as I assume most people do.

[Suzuran]

I apologize; I assumed the over-the-top tone and absurd sentence at the end would be taken as indications of obvious sarcasm.

If your own security (or anything else for that matter) prevents you from working it's clearly not to your benefit.

[xkcd-sucks]

I'm aware of at least one major academic lab, the kind where the PI is a rockstar scientist-cum-entrepreneur and gets a six figure salary from multiple institutions in addition to spinoff startup income, who has had cryptominer malware on their website servers for a few years and doesn't care to go beyond deleting executable every time the website is updated (which naturally comes back immediately afterwords)

Not that this is "acceptable" by any means, just a single calibration point

[mrweasel]

While I can see some minor issues with version upgrades, some software simply have breaking changes, but mostly I'm surprised when people manages to create environments that are really locked to a single OS version.

It used to happen on Windows quite a bit, through now fault of Microsoft. People for one reason or another sometimes see to go out of their way to ensure that their software is tied entirely to one specific version of one operating system.

We dealt with a customer who could upgrade a server, required to use newer TLS versions, but their custom software was pretty much locked to Windows Server 2008. They couldn't even build the software on something newer. I quite honestly don't know how people keep ending up in that situation. I don't think they do it on purpose, but the way they insist on working just makes things work out that way.

[Dalewyn]

Tools exist to serve its user, and so long as a tool keeps working there's no reason to replace it. In real life this is how tools are. You own a screwdriver and you use it until one day it breaks, and then you go and buy a new screwdriver just like your old one.

This is fundamentally different from the nature of computer software, which can completely change in scope and function from one version to another and introduce changes that "break" something for no good reason as far as the user is concerned.

Imagine for a moment if you will: You use your screwdriver everyday, but one day the handle suddenly changes to something completely new and the shaft falls out because the handle uses a new way of fastening the shaft.

You are told by the manufacturer to come in and have it replaced with the newest model, or if they're not so gracious they tell you to come in and buy the newest model.

And for what reason? The screwdriver was working fine until yesterday. You hate this, because as just a simple user there's no good reason the screwdriver suddenly changed itself. Whether you get it replaced or buy a new one, you're wasting time and even money.

You then realize, one way or another, you can just tell your screwdriver that it cannot change without your assent. Ever. You want, perhaps need your screwdriver to work everyday, so you tell it to never change. The manufacturer keeps changing their screwdriver, but yours never changes and it keeps working.

One day though, the screwdriver finally breaks and you need a new one. So you go and buy a new screwdriver. Except it's completely different. And completely incompatible with the rest of your workshop, and all the tools inside which you likewise told to never change.

Why is the computer world so fucking shit?

[mrweasel]

I don't disagree with the tool part and the article is about Apple breaking grep, so fair enough.

My point is that this mostly doesn't happen, yet some people manages to build workflows that for one reason or another gets locked to specific versions of an OS. In my experience that's actually pretty hard to do. The only obvious examples I can think of is the Python 3 migration (which is perhaps why that took years longer than it should have) and certain security related issues.

Maybe it's due to the way some think about computers, maybe it's just bad luck, maybe computers just never change that dramatically for the tooling I use. From the outside it just looks like people go out of their way to lock themselves in, in ways the developers and engineers never imagined or advised.

I love to know more precisely what it is that keeps breaking in the case of this astrophysicist, because I'm betting it's not Emacs. Realistically it's one or more highly specialized programs which has been poorly written and/or packaged badly, if packaged at all.

[jrmg]

Perhaps this is not true for the astrophysicist, but my general experience with the systems of people who experience frequent upgrade-induced-breakage is that they change the system rather than working within it. Switch out things. Switch BSD utilities for GNU equivalents at the system level. Change the configuration of OS services that were never designed to be changed. Do simple looking, but actually really invasive, ‘QOL’ hacks that they found on StackOverflow and the like.

macOS’s SIP is designed to combat malware - but it’s also designed to stop people shooting themselves in the foot by doing things like this.

Note that I’m not trying to make the argument that modifying your system should be _impossible_ to do - I’m sure someone will cry out about ‘software freedom’ - but I do think that some people do it without understanding the consequences.

Generally, it’s possible to customize your user environment without delving into OS internals. To a large degree, even - for example, on Mac Homebrew has, in recent years at least, become very good at this. And my experience, at least, is that if you don’t mess with the underlying _system_, OS upgrades proceed smoothly.

[rfmpie]

Screwdrivers are extremely simple. Computers are extremely complex and subject to complex environments. I'm not sure this is a fair analogy.

[Dalewyn]

Then that's an argument to make computers simpler.

A tool that keeps spontaneously changing under its user's feet is not a particularly useful tool.

[Cyphase]

I bet screwdrivers and similar tools would have to change more often if the laws of physics changed out from under them.

[Dalewyn]

We should be glad god (or whoever the sysadmin is) is content to not constantly patch this simulation.

[flir]

There was a time when every macos upgrade broke VMware, guaranteed. I too am extremely conservative about OS upgrades. Why take the risk when there's almost no benefit? Let the early adopters iron out the bugs for you.

[gempir]

VMware is a highly complicated piece of software relying on a lot of internals of how macOS works. I think it's reasonable to expect that it won't "just work"

I don't say you have to update, but in time security updates will no longer come for your version of macOS and in addition to that you will won't even get new features, like in the new macOS Version the openssh version is newer and now almost fully supports yubikey ssh keys stuff like that.

[flir]

Monterey's got Universal Control (the last OS feature I actually wanted) and the last security update was 8 days ago.

I imagine this laptop will be retired before it needs an OS upgrade but who knows, maybe I'll hit a piece of software that won't run on Monterey before then.

I just checked and everything at least as far back as Yosemite gets three years support. Seems I've got a year before I need to seriously worry about Monterey.

[eptcyka]

This is a very weak excuse.

[wiseowise]

> and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version?

Yes I do. I couldn’t give a s how much security stuff or how many developer issues update solves, backwards compatibility is king. The older I get, the more I am about this. I have million things to take in my life, I’ve paid 3k for this thing and you expect me to sysadmin it on top?

[kaycey2022]

This is OK for OS stuff but what do you do when xcode upgrade breaks how your apps are linked. This is what happened this time with erlang which uses wx for some of the apps. Now the poor erlang team has to backport fixes for all old versions as well.