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Comment by Something1234 | Hacker News Reader

What's in rootless.h?

It appears to be this:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/X11/X11-0.40/xc/programs...

But that’s for Apple’s X server, so maybe Bash’s is different? But I couldn’t find anything about that in a quick google search.

rootless.h in bash seems to be related to system integrity protection.

Don't know why Apple doesn't just devote 1 engineer to do something like homebrew or macports.

Their ROI just on hardware sales will be very high. Maybe all the unix guys retired or left and there are only round window corner xcode guys left.

Apple does have a handful of engineers working with/on open source projects; whether is a part of their official job duties I don’t know. But it is much appreciated. However, to the person doing open source tarballs: please respond to emails and be quicker about uploading thankyouverymuch

> whether is a part of their official job duties I don’t know

Certainly. From what I've read here on HN you basically can't publish a line of code (or even star things on Github) ob your own, presumably for secrecy reasons.

By official job duties I mean "my manager has told me to spend half my time contributing to MacPorts" versus "my manager (and my manager's manager, and their superior, all the way up the chain to the top, plus legal) has allowed me to send commits to to MacPorts even though I work on embedded platforms".

I don't know they don't ship it but bash is compiled with it.

So they're shipping a proprietary version of bash?

Of course not, that'd be a violation of the GPL. They ship their own fork/patched version of bash, whose source is on their open source page: https://opensource.apple.com/source/bash/bash-118.11.1/

So ... rootless.h does nothing? I can compile a bash without it that does exactly the same thing? That seems like it would contradict previous comments. What am I not getting?

It contains the declaration of a single function from macOS's libc. You cannot compile Apple's provided bash sources at all without it, but it's trivial to work around the missing header.

Prototypes for functions to check System Integrity Protection-related stuff.

Exactly!

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