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There's a lot of chatter here about macOS' Unix certification. But in a post shared by another user, it appears that the actual content of that Unix certificati
by pxc 9mo ago
There's a lot of chatter here about macOS' Unix certification. But in a post shared by another user, it appears that the actual content of that Unix certification vindicates OP— macOS' official Unix compatibility requires disabling SIP:
> So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certification-is-a-lie/ https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se, even given the fact of the certification.
- GrowingSideways 9mo ago[dead]
- 7e 9mo agoNone of those things are at all desirable. setuid uucp? Security nightmare. strictatime? Not needed. Linux doesn't do it either. Apple has retained the good parts of UNIX and ignored the shitty parts. In the end, it is more UNIX than Linux is.
- bigyabai 9mo ago[flagged]
- subjectsigma 9mo agoI don't disagree, but what does that possibly have to do with macOS being a Unix or not?
- keeganpoppen 9mo agofantastic point… about… what? certainly not TFA…
- fragmede 9mo agoYeah, like a really shitty ancient version of bash. If that's what UNIX means to you, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but what could be more UNIX like than letting license issues make life worse for your users. Hey, at least it isn't *BSD! (Or, well...)
- ada0000 9mo agomacOS switched to zsh a while ago. i don’t see what that minor choice has to do with being or not being UNIX.
- fragmede 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix but if you've not seen them before then maybe start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
- ada0000 9mo agoI know enough about Unix that shipping an outdated binary in the base system is entirely unsurprising :-)
- pjmlp 9mo agobash doesn't mean UNIX, in fact UNIX means being able to chose your shell.
- spijdar 9mo agoThe visceral response to the statement: > To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users. Rather than configuring it using config files or its thousands of property lists, its controls are largely exposed in System Settings, with a few settings hidden away and only accessible through the defaults command. Is really, really interesting to me, because so many people (including the author) are so invested in the question of whether or not "macOS is Unix". There's so much signaling happening here, people throwing around UNIX all-caps, talking about certifications, the "good parts" of UNIX, that macOS "[is] quite literally [UNIX]", while seemingly missing the author's intention entirely. You don't have to agree with the author, but a good faith interpretation of "macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix" should be obvious in its meaning. Yes, macOS 26 has been certified by The Open Group to be compliant with the Single UNIX Specification. You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity. The point the author is clearly attempting to make is that the idea and system of macOS is not Unix. Even if macOS is, legally speaking, "UNIX®", it was not made to be UNIX®. macOS is not built to adhere to the "UNIX® philosophy". The fact NextStep and OS X after it were BSD-compatible is an implementation detail -- a useful one at that -- but an implementation detail nonetheless. It's like Android's use of the Linux kernel underneath. Yes, Android is Linux, but there's a reason why there's a vocal community of people who champion "Real Linux smartphones". Android uses Linux, but Android isn't defined by Linux. I'm not trying to prove anyone right or wrong here, I just want to give my three cents on the matter. I would call macOS "unix-y" because it's close enough to being a "unix" to be comfortable on the CLI, but I've touched the unix "heart" enough to know it still smells like 2005-ish FreeBSD, largely frozen in time. Of course, that's good enough for most things. But then, does that make Windows a Unix-like, just because it can run Linux ELF executables via WSL1? Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1. Yes, I know, macOS has a "real" BSD core, and a "real" unix heritage through BSD and OSF/1. The point is that it's not hard (IMO) to see where the author is coming from saying "No, macOS is not a Unix". (I disagree with him for different reasons -- he ambiguously implies that "Unix" means being open-source, for instance -- but I agree that macOS as a platform is not very Unix-y, even if it is UNIX®.)
- tim-- 9mo agoFor a long time, Inspur K-UX, a Red Hat Linux derivitive was a Unix O3 certified system as well. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm
- SllX 9mo ago> So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se At the end of the day UNIX is an operating system. A dead operating system that hasn’t seen a release outside of Bell Labs since the 80s and even 10th Edition was 1988, and never distributed. A branch of it persisted through System V and its variants, then it became a spec, then operating systems started calling themselves UNIX according to that spec whether they were Systems V offshoots or reconstructions stemming from Net/2. We’ve been genuine turns away from Unix per se since before I was born. The SUS and POSIX lets people pretend like we’re not.
- anthk 9mo ago9front it's the last 'Unix' release after Unix v8 and Unix v10.
- flomo 9mo agoIMO, that's a pretty poor summary of how the "Unix Wars" really ended. Bell UNIX got productized into System V, and the trademark was dumped off on TOG. But "Unix" was really more of an ideal. The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds. Imagine "Industry-standard APIs" which are actually non-negotiable, and not just some compliance-test. Well, you need the source code, right? We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
- SllX 9mo agoThe “Unix Wars” battle lines were drawn in 1988 with the formation of the X/Open Group and Unix International, the same year Bell Labs put together the 10th Edition’s manual, more or less demarcating its release according to their own conventions even if it wasn’t sold nor distributed. Their next project was Plan 9. Incidentally this was also the year of the last major version of AT&T’s System V, System V Release 4. There would be a couple more minor releases after that, but there was never a System V Release 5. > The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds. I don’t think Stallman nor Torvalds ever saw anything so romantic in UNIX. You could ask them, but it doesn’t jive with well anything in the historical record. > We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX". We have better operating systems, yes, and for a price and some elbow grease, some of them can even use the UNIX trademark which checks a box for some people who might care about that sort of thing.
- pjmlp 9mo agoIt is still a UNIX nontheless, other commercial UNIXes have similar subtleties on their certification.
- mycall 9mo agoIf one was to do all these things, would anything break in the OS and supporting software?
- xmodem 9mo agoI've never tried it myself, but it's oft-repeated folk wisdom in Apple circles that enabling filesystem case-sensitivity breaks all manner of third-party software that has only ever been tested on the case-insensitive default.
- notamario 9mo agoI tried running with case sensitive file system. MacOS itself is fine, but a lot of software isn’t.
- jajuuka 9mo agoIt's pretty telling when the comments on the article and here have devolved into pedantic discussions of "well is it REALLY UNIX?" It's the most inconsequential question with no beneficiary except those who want to claim UNIX purity.
- a-french-anon 9mo agoYou also need to change the /bin/sh symlink (to the included /bin/dash) to avoid multiple bugs in their ancient bash 3.2 showing in POSIX scripts.