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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> What kinds of things do you count as needing "that level of control"?

As a developer, I want complete control over everything on my development machine. It's not enough to just control my home directory. I want to be able to control exactly what system services are running, so that I can test services in the same environment they'll be running in in production. I want to be able to control exactly what versions of things are installed as system binaries, not just in my home directory, so that I can be sure there is no possibility of a version being there that I don't want there. I want to be able to control exactly what device drivers and kernel modules are running. And so on.

Perhaps not all developers take this attitude; it probably depends on what kinds of things you are developing.

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I understand this point of view, and this was also my usual approach. The reason I stopped was that the result was unmanageable systems. If you wanted to change something that you had configured on system level a year before, or even just wanted to replicate it, it became a major overhead. More creative modifications could also sometimes cause conflicts on larger upgrades.

So instead, I keep my systems small. I do not install anything I don't need, and do not touch something that is not necessary. On my laptop, I have 3 "full" applications, 15 convenience tools from homebrew (bash, git, nmap, ...) and 3 kernel extensions (including one of my own) installed. Nothing else that counts as a system-wide modification. Most of my servers are completely stock Alpine, Arch or Ubuntu systems, only running static binaries I provided.

All this saves me from dependency hell, and means that I do not need to hesitate to wipe a machine for whatever reason. It takes me 5 minutes to set a new one up, including my local own work environment.

There's a different between having control (which I have, including on my OS X machine), and actually practicing it.

> The reason I stopped was that the result was unmanageable systems.

I haven't had this issue; but I don't leave things that I test sitting around on my development machine when I'm done testing them. So the "baseline" configuration of my development machine doesn't change much; it has the basic development tools I need and that's it. In fact, I'm not sure I see how the kind of development system you're describing is that different from the kind of development system I was describing.

> having control (which I have, including on my OS X machine)

How do you deal with the issue that prompted the original article discussed in this thread? (I assume you use the csrutil disable method that you described elsewhere in the thread?)

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