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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 3 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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pulisse ◴[22 May 20 18:54 UTC] No.23275569[source]▶
> Brew never had this problem because they chose a sane path

How so? Taking over /usr/local as Homebrew does is guaranteed to cause conflict. Using a dedicated file hierarchy as Nix does is quite reasonable and there's nothing magical about rooting it at /.

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1. ryanianian ◴[22 May 20 19:58 UTC] No.23276249[source]▶
How does it "take over" /usr/local? You can still `./configure --prefix=/usr/local` on your own software and things continue to work as long as you're not installing the same thing that brew is.
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2. masklinn ◴[22 May 20 20:09 UTC] No.23276368[source]▶
> How does it "take over" /usr/local?

Because it shoves all its shit there without asking.

Macports actually did it correctly and IME never had any issue.

3. xyproto ◴[22 May 20 20:12 UTC] No.23276411[source]▶
Installing several versions of the same piece of software is central to Nix.

While locking all needed versions for a specific application provides stability, I can't believe it doesn't come without a large increase of complexity, especially in connection security upgrades which triggers other libraries to need an update as well.