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Hmm, so macOS is just in the habit of plowing over all your system configs when you update OS? That seems hostile. It's admittedly a tricky problem. See, Windo

Hmm, so macOS is just in the habit of plowing over all your system configs when you update OS? That seems hostile. It's admittedly a tricky problem. See, Windows solves it by helpfully resetting or toggling some configuration every time, so you have to be extraordinarily vigilant about things like privacy settings, because those have a way of re-enabling themselves on a regular basis. Then, Linux (at least the main distros I'm used to) attempts to handle this gracefully by keeping most of your changes, but it will put in ".new" files where they think the new examples would be useful, and they also try to point out config merge conflicts, where you may absolutely need a new file, due to changed syntax or whatever, but you also desire to retain your old settings. So it's a balancing act, but I feel it's most transparent and graceful on Linux than anything else. And I'm thankful for how smooth and simple OS updates have become in recent times. Linux users can upgrade-in-place for years, decades.

olliej 3y ago
> Hmm, so macOS is just in the habit of plowing over all your system configs when you update OS? That seems hostile. macOS updates blow away system files, and on macOS pam.d apparently fell into that category. The rationale is not user hostile: you can't have an update break your system due to you having a local change that is incompatible with the update. This is simply a usability tradeoff, and Apple's choice is clearly "ensure the OS will always boot".
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Does it attempt to detect and flag incompatibilities, like Linux, or does it just reset everything unilaterally? The latter is way less effort for the OS but more for the user. A Linux user will typically find themselves going in to find a few instances where merge wasn't possible, and fixing manually, but if the OS won't merge or diff anything on update, that seems to offload burden onto the user. Sure, a booting functional system is great, but so is a system that works like it used to (and is secured the same way and doesn't fail open, although macOS tends to add more secure configuration through updates.)
  - olliej 3y ago
    Normal users don’t know how to resolve issues. Raymond Chen has a blogpost about how MS used to do that in windows updates (the “a newer version of this DLL is installed”) and the result is broken system. In response MS started simply overwriting anything potentially incompatible because if your system boots you can install updates, but if the system doesn’t boot you can’t fix it. macOS takes the same approach - there are specific and safe ways to do most of the things you can do you can do in bsd/unix bunch, that survive updates.

olliej 3y ago

> Hmm, so macOS is just in the habit of plowing over all your system configs when you update OS? That seems hostile. macOS updates blow away system files, and on macOS pam.d apparently fell into that category. The rationale is not user hostile: you can't have an update break your system due to you having a local change that is incompatible with the update. This is simply a usability tradeoff, and Apple's choice is clearly "ensure the OS will always boot".

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Does it attempt to detect and flag incompatibilities, like Linux, or does it just reset everything unilaterally? The latter is way less effort for the OS but more for the user. A Linux user will typically find themselves going in to find a few instances where merge wasn't possible, and fixing manually, but if the OS won't merge or diff anything on update, that seems to offload burden onto the user. Sure, a booting functional system is great, but so is a system that works like it used to (and is secured the same way and doesn't fail open, although macOS tends to add more secure configuration through updates.)
- olliej 3y ago
  Normal users don’t know how to resolve issues. Raymond Chen has a blogpost about how MS used to do that in windows updates (the “a newer version of this DLL is installed”) and the result is broken system. In response MS started simply overwriting anything potentially incompatible because if your system boots you can install updates, but if the system doesn’t boot you can’t fix it. macOS takes the same approach - there are specific and safe ways to do most of the things you can do you can do in bsd/unix bunch, that survive updates.