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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

No excuse really not to be running it.

That's actually something I really admire as a developer in the OS X platform: the users upgrade quickly making it easy to take advantage of new technologies.

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Of course there are excuses. It's a big hassle to upgrade a computer. There's the time involved, so if you can't spare a block of a few hours to be dedicated to your computer while not being able to use it, then that's a big incentive not to upgrade. Also, there's the worrying that it can cause that if something goes wrong, you're going to either lose all your data or have to load it from a backup if you have one.

For something that offers only some speed improvements and no big new features, I have very little reason to upgrade. I wonder what gity is using that makes it 10.6-only.

I'm not on Snow Leopard because I don't have a whole day to waste rebuilding all my unix shit. Nothing wrong with Leopard. I'm going to wait til I get a new machine, then attempt to go the Homebrew path and build all my stuff in ~. That'll be worth the effort where upgrading today would definitely not be.

Exactly. Experience has shown it's unwise to budget less than a full day for an OS upgrade. Multiply > $100/hr. times ~7-8 hours and you start to understand why I haven't yet upgraded. I'd appreciate if these Gity guys would explain why 10.5 wasn't good enough for them.

Gity requires 10.6 because of new Snow Leopard only API's - Grand Central Dispatch and a few others.

Thanks! On rereading the comment, my tone sounds a bit flippant. Sorry about that.

GitX has a Snow Leopard userbase of 61%, so I'm not sure if it would be worthwile to make it Leopard-compatible. I don't think many users would upgrade to SL only for Gity, though some participants of the GitX user survey said they would if GitX were to require SL, so maybe I'm wrong.

How about remote mounting a filesystem using sshfs. I have found this is a big problem on SL. The MacFUSE beta allows it to work at all, but performance can be terrible. I'm trying ExpandDrive now, but it's $49 and performance could still be better.

Unless you're on a PPC processor.

In that case, you're using a machine thats 4+ years old and its about time for an update. Especially if the machine is being used for development.

Last PPC macs were G5 towers in August 2k6, which have plenty of power... And raw beefy system specs aren't really that much of a need for people doing e.g. Ruby coding because hey, Ruby is slow anyway. And the cross-section of people who use Git and people who code Ruby is quite large. http://github.com/languages

Intel Mac's were announced in June 2005 ([1]). Apple started shipping them in the beginning of 2006. Anyone who bought a PPC Mac in August 2006 won't get any pity from me.

And, where isn't it important to have a fast dev machine for, you know, actually getting work done and making sure the code works. The speed differences between a PPC mac and a current day Mac are huge. Yes, you can probably get by with a PPC mac if you don't actually execute any code on your machine. But, I would guess that thats very rare, if your job involves coding.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html

Again, for anyone coding in a scripting language the speed difference isn't particularly significant and isn't enough to affect your workflow noticeably.

What specifically doing Rails coding need a fast dev machine for?

Takes me 3 minutes to run our full test suite, takes some of my colleagues > 10 minutes.

Importing a dump of our production DB takes me only 4 hours, takes them 10.

Ruby coding because hey, Ruby is slow anyway

This logic is absolutely backwards.

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