I agree that sometimes Apple makes bad decisions on their development systems. But I do find them usable, unlike Microsofts which are completely unusable if you want to maintain portability with anything else.
On Dec 4, 2013, at 11:45 PM, Jed Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > Barry Smith <[email protected]> writes: >> And the reason is always in some way related to $ > > As with all decisions (time is money). Jack chose to require the latest > compilers because it saves him development time. PETSc supports ancient > compilers, MPI implementations, and Python because we think that the > time our users save by not having to upgrade their systems (even if we > think their reasons for not upgrading are bogus) is more important than > our time required to maintain that compatibility. > > Apple continues to not assign a developer to make gdb and valgrind work > as well on Apple systems as on Linux/BSD systems because (evidently) > they think that the pain they inflict on the developers will not cause > those people to stop buying Apple products. (I blame Apple for this > state of affairs because they take a working product and change > non-broken things in half-assed ways, like -framework and dsymutil, in > their highly-profitable proprietary system, then expect the developers > of those open source tools to volunteer their time and purchase Apple > hardware to maintain compatibility.)
