Re: Switching to Homebrew as recommended Mac install?

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Jay Levitt <jay(dot)levitt(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Sure, and if humans read docs, instead of just glancing at them, that'd be
> all you needed. In any case, I could counter myself that nobody reads the
> doc period, so it doesn't matter what version is listed; that's just the
> source of my own misunderstanding about maintenance.

Seems odd that you claim the docs are out of date in one breathe, then
in the next counter with an argument that users never read docs so
they're basically irrelevant.

> Well, for "Rubyists", I should properly substitute "younger developers", aka
> "all developers eventually".
>
> As more toolchains work without sudo (Ruby, Python, JavaScript), using sudo
> actually breaks stuff, because now you've written some files as root and
> you'll later fail to overwrite them as user. Heck, I've had that happen with
> ccache; if you do "sudo make install" without "make", you're compiling and
> caching as root, and three years later you'll recompile as user and get a
> permissions error (or a broken ccache IIRC).

I'm not aware that either Python or JavaScript require that you remove
sensible and long established security measures from your machine.
Come to think of it, neither did the MacPorts installation of Ruby
that I used to have to run a couple of utilities, nor does the version
that Apple ship with OS X.

I would suggest that it's not modern languages that require bypassing
of security measures, but a poorly designed packaging system.

> I'm not only telling you that *a* developer doesn't know; I'm telling you
> that soon, *most* won't.  (Or, if they do, they know it's a magic
> incantation that when something breaks, a blog tells them what to type to
> fix it.) I work with a smart 2005 CS graduate who, when I said "look in
> /usr/lib", would try cd'ing to /Users/Library. He wrote his first shell
> script last week.
>
> I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying it is - and you're younger than
> me, so you're not going to get to retire before it happens either!

I run multiple teams of engineers at EnterpriseDB, and many of them
are basically fresh out of university (or were when they joined EDB).
Every single one of them knows what the path is and how to change it,
and I can say with confidence that every one of them could explain to
you what's wrong with making /usr/local/ world writeable. They may not
be able to code in a particular language, but they all have the
ability to learn and the basic skills on which to build. If the
students of the future have as little knowledge of computer systems as
you suggest, we might as well throw away our machines now and go live
in caves or huts!

And on that note, I suggest we take this off pgsql-hackers now as it's
drifting (drifted) way off topic for the list.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company