Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry

Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.

What I care about, at least, are experiences of ease, convenience, compatibility, control, order, and freedom around a programmable system that invites the blurring of the lines between user and developer, between quotidian use and automation, and between decoration and reshaping. Such experiences still involve many of the same elements as they did two decades ago: a composable language of commands, commonly observed conventions, well-organized hierarchies of files, formal software freedom, powerful package management systems, great in-band/offline documentation, etc. But Unix certification isn't the center of gravity around which such experiences revolve, if it ever was. And for that matter, neither is macOS.

Was it delisted from a different “product standard”, or is this submission about macOS 27 not being listed?

Which is a damn shame, because AI dev is going to result in a massive influx of new software right when Apple makes it ever more difficult to do so on its platform.

I still make Mac builds, but it is more of an afterthought on a secondary Mac build machine now.

You know something has peaked when they become less open and more “clawbacky”; that is basically collecting interest on an investment (marketshare) instead of remaining more open (at the cost of some things). “Increased security” is always the rationale.

For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.

The story behind macOS UNIX certification.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016

APFS is mandatory now. I recently used OCLP to coerce macOS 15 "Sequoia" onto my now-elderly 2015 27" Retina iMac. It's a capable machine: 4 cores, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD as the system drive and 8TB HDD for data.

I kept my home directory on the HFS+ HDD. So, fast OS, slower but very capacious personal drive. It was a very simple hack and everything automatically obeyed. Worked fine up to Monterey (macOS 13), the last supported version.

Not now.

Lots of apps wouldn't run and the OS couldn't save lots of settings. I had to go through the first-login wizard every single time.

In the end I moved my home directory to the system volume on the SSD, and then moved all the big folders back out to HFS+ HDD (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) This took 2 days of work but it did the job. Everything works now and the machine is noticeably faster, but now, I'm using 2x more SSD space and less HDD space.

The point being that the POSIX texts require setting classic Unix values on HFS+ drives, and I am not sure all of those still work on APFS, and that will make passing harder.

I think they might do it anyway, and soon, macOS 27, on Arm64 only, might pass... but in an even more wildly nonstandard config.

https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm

I imagine that the cert will be listed for Golden Gate soon.

We just ssh/http to the real Linux machine that runs our things anyway. These days with commoditized VPN and symmetric residential Gigabit internet, that Linux box does not have to be in the cloud either (specially with LLMs guiding the sysadmin tasks).

Any thin client with a browser, an ssh client and an internet connection will do the job.

https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...

And I'm not sure why it would be non-silently/loudly removed: is there an expectation of a press release or weblog post about non-certification?

Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?

Anyway, who cares. FreeBSD is Unix no matter what some standards organization says.

Standards are useful and the fact that these have lasted this long is IMHO evidence of that

For example, I once got in to an argument about how to handle code like this:

  #include <stdint.h>
  uint32_t rotate(uint32_t i, int bits) {
    return (i>>bits) | (i<<(32-bits));
  }

If the value of the right [shift] operand is negative or is greater than or equal to the width of the promoted left operand, the behavior is undefined.

As an aside, this works:

  #include <stdint.h>
  uint32_t rotate(uint32_t i, uint32_t bits) {
    return (i>>(bits%32)) | (i<<(-bits%32));
  }

If the quotient a/b is representable, the expression (a/b)*b + a%b shall equal a

And:

a result that cannot be represented by the resulting unsigned integer type is reduced modulo the number that is one greater than the largest value that can be represented by the resulting type

Likewise, POSIX also means that every system call my open source code does, with the exception of chroot() and setgroups(), is defined in POSIX [1].

The entire environment to make my open source software only depends on POSIX utilities to build, and, indeed, it can build in both a Busybox based and a GNU based environment. For example, none of the filenames in my project have a `-` (dash) in them because, until POSIX 2024, one could not have a `-` or `/` in a filename used by Make, and yes my code builds with a strictly POSIX Make.

I no longer use Python for any of my open source because Python doesn’t have a stable standard to develop against; namely the Debian team got on my case I was using a Python2 script in 2020 when Python2 was made unsupported and I’m not going to play catch up should Python3 (or Perl) ever encounter the same fate Python2 has.

Instead, I write my scripts in Lua 5.1 these days. While Lua 5.1 isn’t a formal standard, the original implementation of Lua 5.1 (or a later version of Lua) has been implemented many times in many languages. There are two independent C implementations of Lua 5.1 in C, and there are also implementations in Go, C#, Javascript, Rust, and so on.

[1] /dev/urandom is also not defined in POSIX, but this is a runtime, not compile time issue, and writing a separate utility to put random bits in a normal file called /dev/urandom is one way to solve the issue.

linux compatibility is way more relevant now.

Given the amount and volume of software that mac has, the fact that almost all new interesting stuff are released for mac first or even mac alone, I also don't think it needs to attach itself to bigger names for platforms.

I think the financial burden of Ubuntu Mobile, Unity 8, and Mir; and the immediate rise of docker and WSL made canonical fully shift to server, so much so that their website no longer is about a better os for people, but what can it do for your cloud. Other distros also followed its path and Linus became all in on servers and IoT. I see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world. Infinitely inconsistent, buggy, patched worked, visionless and rotting. Honestly that is one piece of software that is worse that AI slop.

And so what is there for Apple to compete with honestly? Haiku? Solaris?

Apple wants it to be more like iOS (so they can control what you do on it) while users want a normal computer they can do computer things on without it spewing ads or applying political pressure when someone tries to hold Apple accountable (e.g. the EU trying to make Apple stop abusing their market position).

  $ cat test.sh
  var=
  echo "${var+{\}}"
  cat <<EOF
  ${var+\"foo\"}
  EOF
  $ /bin/sh test.sh
  {\}
  \"foo\"
  $ /bin/dash test.sh
  {}
  "foo"