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Meh. Mac OS X package management is irreparably broken to begin with. There is a "package manager" but... it only knows how to install, not remove packages. Th
by diebir 9y ago
Meh. Mac OS X package management is irreparably broken to begin with. There is a "package manager" but... it only knows how to install, not remove packages.
Then the software vendors are divided as to whether the software should be installed by "dragging" an image into Applications folder, or by running an installer of some sort, which is usually a package that installs other packages or some such. Then, there is a Apple store crap on top of all this, which, if I remember correctly, is also a package manager install.
Apple sucks at software. Mac OS X is stuck in 1995, as far as package management goes. The consumer does not care, hence Apple has no incentive to fix this mess.
Apple has a beautiful thing going: the "drag to install" and the self contained software images. Yet, they won't make any effort to regulate this.
P.S. The "uninstall" process on Mac OS X is usually some sort of a crappy shell script, which executes various "rm -rf" commands. The reliability and quality of those commands is left to the creativity of developers, that normally have no clue and write shell code by looking up examples on the Internet. It's a wonder uninstalls do not wipe out the whole disk more often.
What. A. Mess.
- misterdata 9y agoThis may be true, but still I've encountered very few problems installing, updating and removing software on my Mac despite this compared to other platforms I've used. Why would having separate package managers coexist be a bad thing if they can be complementary? (e.g. Homebrew installs different kinds of things than the drag-to-Applications-folder mechanism).
- Twisell 9y agoMeanwhile on my office PC Windows 10 seem still struggling with the concept of a meaningful progress bar or a readable list of system update (BEFORE triggering a 2 hours WTF update for obscure reasons). Apple do know how to manage packet for system update and provide a dumb-customer-prof one « The AppStore » for paying developers. If developers write messy scripts how come you would it be fair to blame apple. And you will find dubious install process on every plateform from dirty .bat on Win to « easy » makefile for Unix that work after 2 hours of hard tweaking. Sorry for the rant :/
- romwell 9y agoWell, while your rant is true, I haven't had to deal with BAT files (or even Powershell scripts) in Windows installs for a very long time. (One reason for that may be NSIS, bequeathed onto us by Justin Frankel of Winamp, Gnutella and Reaper fame, which allows for streamlined (un)installers).
- Twisell 9y agoA .bat is the worst case but does NSIS prevent a badly written script? I don’t think so, it’s still up to the developer to care. Adding an UI on top of a badly written script will do as much harm as a .bat. (I might be wrong I’m not familiar with NSIS on the dev side while I confess I used it a lot)