Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

If they get rid of option 3, they will make macs unsuitable for a lot of development outside of the Apple ecosystem (they must still be good for development for iOS and macOS apps). Surely that is a large enough part of their userbase that they won't just throw that away

View on HN

>Surely that is a large enough part of their userbase that they won't just throw that away

Don’t be so sure. It’s truly impossible to predict and understand some of decisions Apple's made in the pro market.

Best one can hope for is to get an explanation 10 years from now in a podcast or blog post. If there’s still such a thing

Surely you can turn on option 3 indefinitely for local builds at least. Otherwise Apple kills the ability to develop any software while offline or behind a firewall.

Gatekeeper only applies to software downloaded from the internet. Browsers set the "quarantine" attribute for downloaded files, and then Gatekeeper kicks in on first launch.

Software that you build locally, or that you install with a package manager, is not affected.

The goal of Gatekeeper is to keep your Mac safe -- not to control what you can do on your Mac.

Would something like "cat a.out > b.out" bypass Gatekeeper? I am always puzzled by apps which know the origins of files that they open.

Yes that would bypass it. It's metadata set in the filesystem not a part of the file itself.

What I usually do is:

    xattr -d com.apple.quarantine FILE

It removes the extended attribute from the given file.

Yeah Apple has repeatedly and fairly consistently shown that they're more interested in the luxury consumer market than they are in anything else.

They might want to take some advice from Steve Ballmer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com