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Comment by s3tz | Hacker News Reader

I guess apple using git is too much to ask..

Apple processes the source code before releasing it as open source, like excluding some source files and even stripping specific #ifdef sections. This can be implied from shell scripts that are part of the tarballs.

Such an approach would be way more complicated if the open source release included version control history. These code drops already always come months after the macOS releases.

https://github.com/apple

There is hardly any overlap between their public repos and these modules.

they do all the time for other open source projects, I assume this is just legacy that plugs in with their in-house system.

They could very well be using Git internally. But they don't want to release the full history of their development process, complete with authors, commit messages, and intermediate commits -- that's likely to include or imply a lot of information that isn't appropriate to release.

See also: Google and the non-kernel part of AOSP (it is just a snapshot of the current source at the time, not the in-between releases).

Most internal commit history is intact in AOSP, including the changes between releases. They just have a complex merging setup that deviates slightly from internal branches.

Indeed, and this is so much an industry standard practice that it was particularly significant when Apple open sourced Swift in Dec 2015, they didn't just do a tarball dump or promise that development would be in the open going forward, they actually opened up the whole development history right back to the start of the project in 2010: https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5...

Not really unprecedented though. I'm pretty sure the whole SVN repositories were published for clang, libc++, etc. when they were open sourced.

They do, Apple has an internal gitlab instance which a bunch of teams use.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted.

There's a serious argument that a source dump without commits is not the "preferred form of the work for making modifications".

Well, they could have not released anything instead.

Is not a single bit GPL? It's still worth comparing it to different standards of quality.

Beggars can't be choosers but I'm not begging, I'm evaluating them as a corporate citizen.

Then evaluate them how the people get treated on their factories, not whatever they do with a pity software license.

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