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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen. It reminds me of when Linus preaches that "the kernel should never break userspace". Why would a OS update suddenly cause the Mail app -- developed by the same company as the OS, for what it's worth -- to have these strange (and catastrophic) data syncing issues?

And, just to add, I am tired of OS updates updating and/or releasing userspace things like "Music" and saying:

> iTunes forever changed the way people experienced music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts. It all changes again with three all-new, dedicated apps — Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts — each designed from the ground up to be the best way to enjoy entertainment on your Mac. [0]

It is literally the FIRST thing they advertise. What does that have to do with the OS? Nothing! They should release apps separately from major OS versions.

[0] https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/

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The new OS comes with new versions of apps, and that's usually fine because they're either fixed bugs or added features; the main problem is Apple's internal culture that seems to be preaching "change is good, constant change is always good" --- as I explained in this comment I made a few days ago, the love of constant massive internal changes to their code always tends to cause such bugs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21174947

It makes sense now because they said bug is a feature. No surprise.

>I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen. It reminds me of when Linus preaches that "the kernel should never break userspace". Why would a OS update suddenly cause the Mail app -- developed by the same company as the OS, for what it's worth -- to have these strange (and catastrophic) data syncing issues?

It's doesn't "suddenly" cause the existing Mail app to break.

It's the new version of the Mail app that breaks -- for reasons not having to do with the rest of the OS.

macOS, as an OS, is not just the kernel, SDK, and GUI libs, and tooling: it's rather a distro that includes regular apps like Mail, Safari, Notes, etc.

If it was OS caused, it would affect others apps too.

Because to Apple and Microsoft, the OS is the experience, not just the kernel and some runtime bits of userland. It's more accurate to compare a macOS release to a new Ubuntu release (which updates a bunch of apps in the process), but still not entirely so since they don't insist on tying the default apps so deeply into the OS innards as Apple and Microsoft do.

> I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen.

Right? Are there not automated tests for this stuff? I would expect that if you commit something that causes this, the next day you get an email that says, "your name is on commit $FOO, which caused regression tests to fail in tests/firstparty/apps/mail; please fix it (sincerely, Jenkins)" or so. Heck, it's more egregious here because it's a first party application, but it seems like it would be in their interest to keep copies of the most popular third-party applications and include those in their test suites as well. ("Hi, Adobe? Hey, it's Apple. Hey, so this is a heads up that Photoshop doesn't work with the new OS version; we're sending you a RCA so you can fix it before it hits end users.")

I wouldn't place much emphasis on testing, and Apple most likely has tests, because the exact conditions that trigger such bugs are often so narrow that an artificial testing environment for them to "make the stars line up" would be nearly impossible to create. Anything involving multithreading/asynchronous code tends to fall in that category, but even single-threaded code can be like that; to make an artificial relevant example, it could be something like "if two consecutively received emails are exactly 8192 bytes long[1], and the first one is the 256th message in the folder when sorted by the sender's email, then the second one will be missing." That's a condition which you're highly unlikely to hit, even more so if you're generating test data randomly (as some tools like to do, and fuzzing is one prominent example). Even if you specifically test power-of-2 sizes, the two-in-a-row subcondition would make that improbable. If you let everyone in Apple "dogfood" the software, they might not hit. Yet everyone who has subscribed to a set of mailing lists that happened to issue such an exact sequence of messages would see the bug.

That's also why I think other automated tools and "code quality" metrics don't help so much; tests are more of a sanity/last-chance check and shouldn't be relied upon to catch everything. Correctness should be assured through design and code reviews, and for that nothing beats the power of intense mental deliberation. To paraphrase a popular saying, "there is no replacement for intelligence."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797640

You are absolutely right, but all of this is known to Apple.

What they need to do when it's potentially about permanent loss of user data is to prove that a postcondition is met (i.e. all messages were successfully converted) and roll back if it isn't.

Instead they apparently sync the faulty data with the IMAP server and destroy what most users consider their email backup. This is breathtaking incompetence and negligence if it's actually true.

The worst thing is that it is near impossible to find out whether or not you're affected by this.

I'm so fed up with Apple and its second rate software. I have lost music playlists in this ill fated Catalina "upgrade" as well. I've been wanting to move on to a more flexible and less oppressive environment for a while. At least this finally breaks my inertia.

>I'm so fed up with Apple and its second rate software. I have lost music playlists in this ill fated Catalina "upgrade" as well. I've been wanting to move on to a more flexible and less oppressive environment for a while. At least this finally breaks my inertia.

Try Linux or Windows! Their first rate apps will keep your email safe and secure!

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/372...

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=88648

https://blog.lightlyseared.online/2010/04/06/fixing-corrupt-...

https://windowsreport.com/outlook-emails-disappeared/

https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/06/20/outlook-coms-mis...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/237103/five_outlook_nightmar...

You're missing the point. If I'm getting shoddy QA anyway, why keep paying Apple's excessive prices and accept their oppressive content restrictions?

No reason, especially since others are both cheaper AND better at shoddy QA!

>Right? Are there not automated tests for this stuff? I would expect that if you commit something that causes this, the next day you get an email that says, "your name is on commit $FOO, which caused regression tests to fail in tests/firstparty/apps/mail; please fix it (sincerely, Jenkins)" or so.

Do you really believe they aren't running automated tests at Apple?

It's more likely than not, that this was not caught by one of the tests...

You have a very outdated vision of what constitutes an OS. (Or perhaps a very Linux-centric vision.) Nowadays an OS is far more than just a kernel. It's the associated userland libraries, frameworks, and basic utilities. And yes, the scope of these basic utilities have expanded far beyond just shell-utilities like sh or cat; they now include things like a graphical mail client.

How is that a Linux-centric vision? Linux distributions have always tightly coupled application updates to OS (distribution) updates. In fact, this was often a criticism of Linux and one of the motivators for a lean immutable system like Fedora Silverblue, where you install and update applications out-of-band with Flatpak.

I'm talking about the Linux project. You're talking about GNU/Linux distributions.

>How is that a Linux-centric vision?

In that many people consider the Linux kernel and basic userland as the "OS", and the applications, packaging, etc as the "distro".

Even casually, when we mention OSes, we say "Windows, macOS, Linux", not "Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Centos, etc etc...".

I’ve always seen MacOS releases like a UNIX distribution release, encompassing more than just the OS, including userland applications and development tools.

It seems that by locking their userland application release cadences to that of the rest of the distribution they lower the number of unique configurations of userland applications and OS components they have to support in the wild. I’d imagine this has implications with regards to the cost of support.

This happens to iOS: every time there's a new major version coming, the layout of many apps breaks for some reason and elements move all over the place. I wonder why.

Huh? Never happened to me, much less "every time".

I had some apps break and need update after an iOS update, but not layout problems in apps... at least not in the 50+ non-Apple apps I use...

WhatsApp currently has some weird layout bugs when swiping back to the root view for me.

More annoyingly, it seems the changes to how multiple windows are handled has made it so any visible notification will prevent me from interacting with anything except the notification, so I can't ignore them anymore - I have to dismiss them to carry on using the phone.

I see. Don't use WhatsApp anymore, so can't check.

Well "otool -L iTunes" shows Carbon in there, and Catalina doesn't have Carbon.

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