Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 13:26:49 +1000 (EST) Fantastic feedback Erik. I had been playing around with the thought if getting an ibook, but your comments have made me far less keen.
> 1) Extremely poor libtool/autoconf/automake support. Now you might say this > is not Apple's fault but I think it is. Apple has decided to do a number > of things in a completely non-standard Unix way. For instance I still > do not understand dynamic linking on OSX; there is no ldd program. Is it called something else? For instance, the command to show shared lib usage and other stuff on hp-ux is 'chattr'. Surely this is a standard freebsd thing anyway?!? > 2) sed is broken (in comparison to GNU sed and seemingly more than other > unixen). The command line > > sed s/some pattern with spaces/xxx/ > > > fails because the Mac sed is not smart enough to realise that the spaces > are part of the pattern. Are you using quotes around that? I've never known a sed to understand multiple args are a single expression. > 3) The mv command does not allow the renaming of directories in place ie > > mv old_dir_name new_name What does freebsd do here? I know that some Unixes or Unix-like OS's (e.g. plan9? ) don't allow dir renaming because of race conditions. > 4) Speed. With the Aqua GUI and X running it certainly ain't fast, even with > 256Meg of RAM. As soon as I get around to installing Linux on it I'll have > something to compare it to. This'd be one of my main concerns. If it's behind the equivalently priced Dell for instance now, what will it be like in a a year or so? The other thing that concerns me is their jumping through hoops to avoid putting metainfo in the name. It has to make it far more complex to do porting and navigating files under the different subsystems. Look at the complexity and security problems caused by Windows machines trying to maintain 8.3 filename compatibility, Unicode and data forks in their filesystem. Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
