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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 1 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.284s | source
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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 17:36 UTC] No.23274749[source]▶
Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading.

As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510

[3]: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%...

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yalogin ◴[22 May 20 18:16 UTC] No.23275183[source]▶
Brew never had this problem because they chose a sane path without corrupting the system directory. It’s a bad design on part of NixOS and one can even say the changes in the macOS were designed to encourage good/sane design.
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tomp ◴[22 May 20 18:23 UTC] No.23275262[source]▶
Exactly. What's more, if we're talking about user hostility, how hostile is when a software doesn't provide a configurable install dir? It's literally a single damn variable!!
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1. rcxdude ◴[22 May 20 19:24 UTC] No.23275903[source]▶
it's a single variable which many parts of the system need to have knowledge about, some parts which have basically no way to feed in a variable. You can change the root directory in nix, but that invalidates all binary packages, in part because rpath is not at all configurable.