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Is this like synaptic et al.? I mean, do you get updates automatically? That would be great! Also, a central packaging tool helps avoiding multiple installation

by kleiba 16y ago

Is this like synaptic et al.? I mean, do you get updates automatically? That would be great! Also, a central packaging tool helps avoiding multiple installations of the same software, when dependencies can be tracked and resolved. If that is what this is: cool.

watty 16y ago
One of the sections says "Since developers are constantly improving their apps, the App Store for Mac keeps track of your apps and tells you when an update is available. Update one app at a time or all of them at once, and you’ll always have the latest version of every app you own." Doesn't sound like auto-update though.
- rmc 16y ago
  APT/synaptic etc. don't 'auto-update' installed software. Some manual intervention is required. However it's possible to update all your software in one go, with one command. That's a great feature.
cmelbye 16y ago
It doesn't automatically update apps, but it works like the iPhone App Store. There's a place in the app you can go to where you can see all apps that have updates available and then you can install all of them or selectively choose updates to install.
rlmw 16y ago
They don't do dependency tracking, but will notify you of updates. I don't think Mac developers believe in packaging libraries, since it requires the same version of the library for all programs. The preferred way to do things is statically compile all of your dependencies into your binary. This has the advantage that you can just drag your .app bundle around.
- jonprins 16y ago
  Which, considering disk space is cheap, is a better way to do it than getting stuck in apt dependency hell.
  - tftfmacedo 16y ago
    It's also a security nightmare.
    - seabee 16y ago
      So what's the solution? In the absence of libraries that never break and are fully backwards-compatible with newer versions, we have to make some tradeoffs...
    - moopark 16y ago
      No. It is not. I'm really tired of this argument. It assumes other platforms are the same as Linux, and that's incorrect. Here's why you're wrong: Unlike Linux, Mac OS X ships with a standard, stable, and exceptionally complete set of libraries. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain binary and API compatibility, and this means a few things: - Most applications will only require Apple-supplied libraries, as there's very little that isn't provided by the OS libraries. - Apple keeps the OS libraries up-to-date. This feature-complete ABI/API-stable environment is not free for Apple to provide -- it takes a lot of effort to provide a consistent API across libraries and maintain the API/ABI compatibility across releases, but the advantages are tremendous. Mac OS X has been able to skate by without package management for years because this approach allows for drag-install drag-uninstall application distribution. UNIX derivatives, on the other hand, were faced with a lack of standardization of core application libraries, a huge number of incompatible libraries to fill in the gaps, and a software distribution model that involves splatting files all over the disk. The end result is that you need a packaging system to maintain security updates, manage all the files on disk, and upgrade the world in lockstep due to API/ABI compatibility issues across libraries shared by wildly disparate applications. So -- tl;dr -- it's not a security 'nightmare' because the core libraries that everyone uses are already shared and updated by the OS vendor. This is also what makes Mac OS X so much nicer to develop and distribute applications for as compared to platforms that require a centralized package manager authority to keep things sane.

by kleiba 16y ago

watty 16y ago

One of the sections says "Since developers are constantly improving their apps, the App Store for Mac keeps track of your apps and tells you when an update is available. Update one app at a time or all of them at once, and you’ll always have the latest version of every app you own." Doesn't sound like auto-update though.

rmc 16y ago
APT/synaptic etc. don't 'auto-update' installed software. Some manual intervention is required. However it's possible to update all your software in one go, with one command. That's a great feature.

cmelbye 16y ago

It doesn't automatically update apps, but it works like the iPhone App Store. There's a place in the app you can go to where you can see all apps that have updates available and then you can install all of them or selectively choose updates to install.

rlmw 16y ago

They don't do dependency tracking, but will notify you of updates. I don't think Mac developers believe in packaging libraries, since it requires the same version of the library for all programs. The preferred way to do things is statically compile all of your dependencies into your binary. This has the advantage that you can just drag your .app bundle around.

jonprins 16y ago
Which, considering disk space is cheap, is a better way to do it than getting stuck in apt dependency hell.
- tftfmacedo 16y ago
  It's also a security nightmare.
  - seabee 16y ago
    So what's the solution? In the absence of libraries that never break and are fully backwards-compatible with newer versions, we have to make some tradeoffs...
  - moopark 16y ago
    No. It is not. I'm really tired of this argument. It assumes other platforms are the same as Linux, and that's incorrect. Here's why you're wrong: Unlike Linux, Mac OS X ships with a standard, stable, and exceptionally complete set of libraries. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain binary and API compatibility, and this means a few things: - Most applications will only require Apple-supplied libraries, as there's very little that isn't provided by the OS libraries. - Apple keeps the OS libraries up-to-date. This feature-complete ABI/API-stable environment is not free for Apple to provide -- it takes a lot of effort to provide a consistent API across libraries and maintain the API/ABI compatibility across releases, but the advantages are tremendous. Mac OS X has been able to skate by without package management for years because this approach allows for drag-install drag-uninstall application distribution. UNIX derivatives, on the other hand, were faced with a lack of standardization of core application libraries, a huge number of incompatible libraries to fill in the gaps, and a software distribution model that involves splatting files all over the disk. The end result is that you need a packaging system to maintain security updates, manage all the files on disk, and upgrade the world in lockstep due to API/ABI compatibility issues across libraries shared by wildly disparate applications. So -- tl;dr -- it's not a security 'nightmare' because the core libraries that everyone uses are already shared and updated by the OS vendor. This is also what makes Mac OS X so much nicer to develop and distribute applications for as compared to platforms that require a centralized package manager authority to keep things sane.