OS X Lion Keeps its Yummy Unix Flavor | Hacker News Reader

OS X Lion Keeps its Yummy Unix Flavor

macobserver.com

12 pointsjmartellaro8 comments

This is not an especially detailed article. A few points:

+ Terminal.app has a significant, long-awaited update that they don't mention: 256 color support. (They have a link to Apple that says it explicitly, but then what's the point of the article.)

+ Python is 2.7.1 (pretty good, I think, but I'm not a Python person, so others may disagree and wish for 2.7.2).

+ Ruby is 1.8.7-p249. This is a real shame. I can only guess that they consider 1.9.2 unstable. In any case a real shame, though I suppose most Rubyists use rvm now.

+ Rails is not actually installed. There's a stub at /usr/bin/rails with this content:

    #!/bin/sh
    echo 'Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version,  simply type:'
    echo
    echo '    $ sudo gem install rails'
    echo
    echo 'You can then rerun your "rails" command.'

I thought that Rails was previously installed out of the box, but maybe I'm misremembering. In any case, this may be a smart move, given how fast Rails moves

+ Vim is 7.3 - persistent_undo is enabled, conceal is not (normal feature set). Emacs is GNU Emacs 22.1.1. (I don't use it, so I'm not really sure what features I might want to check for).

+ /bin/bash is 3.2.48(1)-release.

+ He seems to imagine that Apple might have chosen to ship with (only?) Perl 6, but they avoided it because Perl 6 makes no promises to be backwards compatible with Perl 5. I think that this is either a gross simplification or an outright confusion. Most people expect Perl 5 to continue a healthy life, no matter how stable and efficient Perl 6 becomes, for some time to come. (Btw, if you wish to build your own, more recent Perls on Lion, see here: http://www.perlbrew.pl/FixLion.html.)

Ruby 1.8 has been in OSX for a long time, I think apple is just go with a VERY conservative methodology of whatever the "stable/doesn't break existing scripts" version is released at the time. Given 1.8 will be deprecated before the next release is out they won't have much choice but to use 1.9 then, or 2.0 maybe if its out.

Compare to the new(er) perl 5 releases, ruby 1.9 does change some core things. Take for example the ping class being removed in 1.9. In perl 5.10->5.14.1 all of the new things like "say" and the new case statement are things you have to explicitly request in a script which sort of implies you know you need it. Existing scripts won't behave much different on 5.14 than they did on 5.8.x

I upgraded my last Leopard box last night so can't find the builtin emacs version but its been around the 22.x series for some time. I don't think they track upstream nearly as insanely as most linux distros do.

In either case I think rvm/perlbrew/pythonbrew and things like virtualenv/forgot the perl equivalent, sort of obviate the need for up to date interpreters in the base install.

I think php was at 5.3 ish when I checked last night, forgot to look at the shell versions but zsh is new enough for my tastes.

Just found another machine to check: on Snow Leopard, Rails 2.3.5 is installed, rather than there just being the stub. As I say, the stub is probably not a bad idea - better to nudge people to get Rails in other ways, rather than rely on an Apple shipped version that will be swiftly out of date.

I did notice that when I upgraded Git was removed, but I can't remember if it came with snow leopard or if I installed it.

I don't think git has ever been included with OS X, but it has been part of Xcode 4.x. Once you install Xcode 4.1 or later on Lion, you should have git again. (Xcode 4.1 includes git 1.7.4.4)

Yes I believe you're correct. Now I'm downloading Xcode from the app store but it's taking _forever_ I suspect Apple is getting hammered right now.

Git wasn't included out of the box in Snow Leopard.

Very reassuring. Nice to see Safari sandboxing, too.

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