Hacker News Reader

Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

Time to lift your head out of the sand then. Macbook Pro now comes in 32GB RAM flavors, with fn keys instead of the touch bar, and zsh by default

View on HN

Zsh isn't Bash. And Bash version compatibility is important when 75% of your team develop on Linux, but the other 25% on Mac.

I mean, I use Fish, but when I'm writing shell scripts for others, it's Bash, because it's a common default. But now I'm limited to Bash 3.

But I'm glad that they got rid of that stupid bar, and let you get a laptop with 32G of RAM now. So kind of Apple!

Why not just install a newer version of bash? It’s trivial to do so with homebrew. I’m sure your team has other dependencies that must be installed in order to run your software.

Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing.

And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script.

All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3.

At this point, I may as well insist that you install pyenv and Poetry and deliver it as a Python package.

Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places.

You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.

Yeah, fair enough, I'm just bitter after my shiny new associative array failed and I had roll back to a worse option.

Bash really isn't a standard outside of most Linux distributions, you're going to find the same issue anywhere that isn't Linux.

OpenBSD uses pdksh, Busybox/NetBSD/Minix use ash, there are some linux distros that use zsh, OpenSolaris is ksh, etc.

Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare.

If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so.

Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a license that's simply not compatible with any closed-source software business. Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

> Your bash scripts won't work on Windows

Well neither would the code we're developing either so, not really a problem.

> Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

Oh, most definitely. But then none of our products are closed-source, so we're an outlier, admittedly.

And I’m going to guess that your apps run on Linux systems in production.

So, I don’t think it makes sense to criticize macOS for being different than Linux. I can’t run my systemd units in macOS, either.

We might as well raise hell about Apple not pre-installing Firefox for us.

Indeed there’s actually a 64gb variant

64GB even too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com