4 ms·

Initially, I was thinking the same thing. Given how fast the average Apple consumer updates to major iOS releases, I imagine that rolling it out over a point re

by pflats 10y ago

Initially, I was thinking the same thing. Given how fast the average Apple consumer updates to major iOS releases, I imagine that rolling it out over a point release is actually part of the plan. Presumably, if something does go wrong on the individual level, the support burden on the genius bars will be lower (since major iOS releases have traditionally come alongside hardware releases), and if a major bug is found, the number of devices affected will also likely be smaller. It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense. edit: Also, if it went out with 11.0, coordinating all the bug fixes for a 11.0.1 would almost definitely take longer than whatever will be in 10.3.1 release, letting any APFS issues get tweaked faster.

mikeash 10y ago
Rolling it out first on iOS at all doesn't seem like the right approach. If I were somehow in charge of it, I imagine I'd want to do it like: 1) ship it as officially supported on the Mac, but off by default. 2) a year or two later, ship it as officially supported on the Mac, on by default, but still allow HFS+ as an option. 3) A year or two after that, if all has gone well, then introduce it into iOS (where presumably it's not reasonable to make it optional). It's really weird to me that Apple is rolling it out to hundreds of millions of devices all at once, when it's not even a bootable filesystem on any of their platforms yet. Seems like the kind of thing where you'd want to take a more gradual approach. I get that HFS+ is super old and I see why Apple wants to switch to APFS. But I don't get why they're in such a hurry. Here's hoping their approach works well, in any case!
- MBCook 10y ago
  The iOS filesystem environment is WAY more controlled than OS X. Updating OS X first would be fewer machines but is the much more difficult task. This would also be one hell of a production test. They obviously think they're ready.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >If I were somehow in charge of it, I imagine I'd want to do it like: 1) ship it as officially supported on the Mac, but off by default. 2) a year or two later, ship it as officially supported on the Mac, on by default, but still allow HFS+ as an option. 3) A year or two after that, if all has gone well, then introduce it into iOS (where presumably it's not reasonable to make it optional The plan doesn't make much sense. For one, the Mac has way more edge cases than iOS (in that people do more, and in more low- and -high level ways) with the filesystem, including running all kinds of unix userlands, exchanging files with other filesystems, etc. In iOS all fs APIs and access are tightly controlled, and there's no mounting of disks, no touching outside the sandbox, no disk management apps, etc. So iOS is a much better target for first launch than OS X. Second, with this plan it would take 3-5 years to ever arrive. Why so late? Apple has been developing it for a while, and probably have thousands of tests it has to pass. And they have been running it on 1 million or more devs on the 10.3 beta program on actual devices for feedback for 2 months.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    3-5 years seems to be pretty typical for a filesystem to go from merely available to being battle tested enough to use without thinking about it. Bugs could destroy people's data (and the cloud won't necessarily help if the bugs corrupt data rather than erase it). What's the hurry?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Bugs could destroy people's data (and the cloud won't necessarily help if the bugs corrupt data rather than erase it). There's no reason to expect bugs if you have a comprehensive test suite and extensive internal and beta testing (like with a million of registered iOS developers running it for months). Doubly so if you control most of the APIs and interactions with the OS tightly in your platform (as iOS does).
      - mikeash 10y ago
        Which is why the rest of iOS has no bugs? This statement makes me wonder, have you written any software before?
- 0x0 10y ago
  iOS has always used case-sensitive HFS, while macs usually need case-insensitive HFS. Since it looks like APFS will drop support for the case-insensitive file system mode, it makes sense to do the forced upgrade on the system that already uses a case-sensitive file system (= iOS). Plus, it's more straightforward recovering from a broken FS upgrade on iOS since many customers will have iCloud backups enabled, or at least their data stored on iCloud drive, while a mac filled to the brim with all sorts of strange applications and files spread all over the filesystem, likely never been backed up properly, is a tougher call.
  - CameronBanga 10y ago
    I don't have a source, and too tired to look it up. But I thought I saw someone back away who found some tucked away support in APFS for case insensitive file support on macOS. Maybe misremembering. But someone had hacked it to run as a boot drive, and in doing so, found the setting.
- tehabe 10y ago
  The problem with supporting APFS and HFS+ at the same time is that FileVault and Time Machine need to be very different on APFS. FileVault can take advantage of the transparent encryption feature of APFS and TimeMachine can simply backup a snapshot of the file system. I don't know if Apple (who likes to drop things) will support both concepts. Also the reason why I assume that APFS will be coming to macOS in the next major release and not in a point release.
- h1d 10y ago
  What do they care about macOS? I need to see desktops revealed soon.
agmcleod 10y ago
> It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense. Wouldn't this be valid semver if the APIs or general functionality hasn't changed? Or isn't expected to?
- pflats 10y ago
  I'm far from an expert on file systems or semantic versioning, but the one thing I've heard is that APFS changes the way filenames are written to and read from disk. HFS+ (the old file system Apple OSes used) would automatically normalize file names so you couldn't have two files with names that look the same to a user but are represented with different byte sequences. APFS does not do this on the file-system level. (I heard thirdhand that some APIs might still do the normalization, but I don't have any links or details on that and don't want to spread bad info.) http://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenames/ http://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenam...
msbarnett 10y ago
> It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense. If you maintain the public API, it's perfectly valid to radically change the implementation details in a point release. If you're not going to respect the encapsulation of that kind of working knowledge behind an API, then you might as well just demand the very release of everything should be a Major version release.
gervase 10y ago
Additionally, it may be a way of hedging their bets. If it all goes smoothly, great. However, if it turned into a big flaming dumpster fire, an iOS point release has a lot less to lose than a major release (and the associated new hardware that comes with one). "iOS Update Causes Widespread Outages" plays a lot differently with the average person on the street (who already distrusts software updates in general) than "New iPhone Fundamentally Flawed". Feel free to craft your own hyperbolic headlines, but hopefully you get the idea. If there is any way to link software issues with an iPhone launch, media outlets will do it to grab views from people considering a purchase (i.e., damage to the product launch). The same isn't true of an update; it damages the perception of the ecosystem, but most people don't even know what a software ecosystem is.
- h1d 10y ago
  Of course they know... They always get buggy upgrade on games and ironically, thanks to them, people are more or less used to buggy upgrades and may not freak out in those events.

by pflats 10y ago

mikeash 10y ago

Rolling it out first on iOS at all doesn't seem like the right approach. If I were somehow in charge of it, I imagine I'd want to do it like: 1) ship it as officially supported on the Mac, but off by default. 2) a year or two later, ship it as officially supported on the Mac, on by default, but still allow HFS+ as an option. 3) A year or two after that, if all has gone well, then introduce it into iOS (where presumably it's not reasonable to make it optional). It's really weird to me that Apple is rolling it out to hundreds of millions of devices all at once, when it's not even a bootable filesystem on any of their platforms yet. Seems like the kind of thing where you'd want to take a more gradual approach. I get that HFS+ is super old and I see why Apple wants to switch to APFS. But I don't get why they're in such a hurry. Here's hoping their approach works well, in any case!

MBCook 10y ago
The iOS filesystem environment is WAY more controlled than OS X. Updating OS X first would be fewer machines but is the much more difficult task. This would also be one hell of a production test. They obviously think they're ready.
coldtea 10y ago
>If I were somehow in charge of it, I imagine I'd want to do it like: 1) ship it as officially supported on the Mac, but off by default. 2) a year or two later, ship it as officially supported on the Mac, on by default, but still allow HFS+ as an option. 3) A year or two after that, if all has gone well, then introduce it into iOS (where presumably it's not reasonable to make it optional The plan doesn't make much sense. For one, the Mac has way more edge cases than iOS (in that people do more, and in more low- and -high level ways) with the filesystem, including running all kinds of unix userlands, exchanging files with other filesystems, etc. In iOS all fs APIs and access are tightly controlled, and there's no mounting of disks, no touching outside the sandbox, no disk management apps, etc. So iOS is a much better target for first launch than OS X. Second, with this plan it would take 3-5 years to ever arrive. Why so late? Apple has been developing it for a while, and probably have thousands of tests it has to pass. And they have been running it on 1 million or more devs on the 10.3 beta program on actual devices for feedback for 2 months.
- mikeash 10y ago
  3-5 years seems to be pretty typical for a filesystem to go from merely available to being battle tested enough to use without thinking about it. Bugs could destroy people's data (and the cloud won't necessarily help if the bugs corrupt data rather than erase it). What's the hurry?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Bugs could destroy people's data (and the cloud won't necessarily help if the bugs corrupt data rather than erase it). There's no reason to expect bugs if you have a comprehensive test suite and extensive internal and beta testing (like with a million of registered iOS developers running it for months). Doubly so if you control most of the APIs and interactions with the OS tightly in your platform (as iOS does).
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Which is why the rest of iOS has no bugs? This statement makes me wonder, have you written any software before?
0x0 10y ago
iOS has always used case-sensitive HFS, while macs usually need case-insensitive HFS. Since it looks like APFS will drop support for the case-insensitive file system mode, it makes sense to do the forced upgrade on the system that already uses a case-sensitive file system (= iOS). Plus, it's more straightforward recovering from a broken FS upgrade on iOS since many customers will have iCloud backups enabled, or at least their data stored on iCloud drive, while a mac filled to the brim with all sorts of strange applications and files spread all over the filesystem, likely never been backed up properly, is a tougher call.
- CameronBanga 10y ago
  I don't have a source, and too tired to look it up. But I thought I saw someone back away who found some tucked away support in APFS for case insensitive file support on macOS. Maybe misremembering. But someone had hacked it to run as a boot drive, and in doing so, found the setting.
tehabe 10y ago
The problem with supporting APFS and HFS+ at the same time is that FileVault and Time Machine need to be very different on APFS. FileVault can take advantage of the transparent encryption feature of APFS and TimeMachine can simply backup a snapshot of the file system. I don't know if Apple (who likes to drop things) will support both concepts. Also the reason why I assume that APFS will be coming to macOS in the next major release and not in a point release.
h1d 10y ago
What do they care about macOS? I need to see desktops revealed soon.

agmcleod 10y ago

> It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense. Wouldn't this be valid semver if the APIs or general functionality hasn't changed? Or isn't expected to?

pflats 10y ago
I'm far from an expert on file systems or semantic versioning, but the one thing I've heard is that APFS changes the way filenames are written to and read from disk. HFS+ (the old file system Apple OSes used) would automatically normalize file names so you couldn't have two files with names that look the same to a user but are represented with different byte sequences. APFS does not do this on the file-system level. (I heard thirdhand that some APIs might still do the normalization, but I don't have any links or details on that and don't want to spread bad info.) http://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenames/ http://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenam...

msbarnett 10y ago

> It stills feels wrong on a gut level, and semver folks might not be happy with it, but it seems to make some real sense. If you maintain the public API, it's perfectly valid to radically change the implementation details in a point release. If you're not going to respect the encapsulation of that kind of working knowledge behind an API, then you might as well just demand the very release of everything should be a Major version release.

gervase 10y ago

Additionally, it may be a way of hedging their bets. If it all goes smoothly, great. However, if it turned into a big flaming dumpster fire, an iOS point release has a lot less to lose than a major release (and the associated new hardware that comes with one). "iOS Update Causes Widespread Outages" plays a lot differently with the average person on the street (who already distrusts software updates in general) than "New iPhone Fundamentally Flawed". Feel free to craft your own hyperbolic headlines, but hopefully you get the idea. If there is any way to link software issues with an iPhone launch, media outlets will do it to grab views from people considering a purchase (i.e., damage to the product launch). The same isn't true of an update; it damages the perception of the ecosystem, but most people don't even know what a software ecosystem is.

h1d 10y ago
Of course they know... They always get buggy upgrade on games and ironically, thanks to them, people are more or less used to buggy upgrades and may not freak out in those events.