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0 pointsskissane7mo ago0 comments

> In some ways, Apple's adherence to UNIX specifications probably makes macOS less useful for you. For example, I wish that grep on macOS was closer to GNU grep. When I look up commands online, I often find answers based on the GNU implementations. Those often work on macOS, but sometimes don't (or have subtly different behavior) because macOS is adhering to the UNIX specification rather than to what those utilities do on the vast majority of systems out there.

UNIX certification is not the reason why macOS utilities are missing options compared to GNU - UNIX standards say you have to have certain options which work a certain way, they don’t prohibit adding additional options as vendor extensions. The reason is that Apple’s investment in improving these tools is minimal because it is a low priority for them, and because people who get annoyed by this often just end up installing the GNU tools anyway (using Homebrew or MacPorts)

In fact, GNU/Linux systems have been certified as UNIX in the past, by a couple of different Chinese vendors (Inspur K-UX, Huawei EulerOS)-which shows use of the GNU tools is no inherent obstacle to certification. The reason these vendors stopped, I suspect, is the money it was making them was smaller than the certification costs and UNIX trademark license fee

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jchw7mo ago

Pretty sure GNU coreutils really does intentionally deviate from POSIX compliance in a handful of places, otherwise POSIXLY_CORRECT wouldn't exist. That said you're probably right, though I also suspect dealing with GPL licensing is another major reason they don't bother with things like GNU coreutils. (Obviously they definitely wouldn't have done it after coreutils switched to GPLv3, but I'm sure even before then they would've greatly preferred permissively-licensed software.)

chasil7mo ago

There is some subtlety that you are missing here.

Outside of coreutils, let's consider bash and ksh88.

The two have differing behavior in several areas (coprocesses, alias handling, final pipeline fork, etc.), but this divergence in behavior happened before POSIX.2 and the standardization of the POSIX shell, which is largely a subset of ksh88.

The gist is that activating a mode for POSIX compliance will generally remove functionality, because the standardization happened a decade after development began, and the standards themselves were excessively conservative in adherence to System V.

I've seen that useful GNU extensions are generally adopted by BSD, but much more slowly by POSIX.

That does not serve UNIX well. Someone should challenge the Austin Group for effective control of UNIX standardization.

jchw7mo ago

AFAIK, enabling POSIXLY_CORRECT doesn't get rid of any functionality. It changes some very subtle behaviors, such as the way certain argument parsing edge cases would be handled.

Anyway, I think this is somewhat a non-issue: even if bash doesn't fully comply with POSIX standards by default, it should still be possible to be POSIX compliant by delivering a compliant shell in the right place. Though this does make me wonder if there's anything in POSIX that would require the user's default login shell to be POSIX-compliant, Bourne shell compatible. Probably not, right? After all, macOS had been using bash for ages with no issues complying.

chasil7mo ago

Nope nope nope.

You can see this in a script by defining:

  alias p=printf

Then try to use it with bash. If bash is running as #!/bin/sh, then it will work, because bash is forced into POSIX mode.

However, if the script is running as #!/bin/bash, then you will be in the '80s behavior, and it will fail.

Try it.

1 more reply

skissaneOP7mo ago

> Pretty sure GNU coreutils really does intentionally deviate from POSIX compliance in a handful of places, otherwise POSIXLY_CORRECT wouldn't exist.

To get UNIX certification, you can just patch it to make POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 the default.

Or even don’t patch the utilities, and just patch /etc/profile to set POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 globally.

UNIX certification requires that the system have a mode of operation available which passes the test suite; the existence of config settings which if changed from their defaults produce standards violations is not in itself a standards violation.

jchw7mo ago

The point is that the default build of GNU coreutils in the default configuration is not POSIX compliant, not that it can't be made to be POSIX compliant. Obviously it can be done, otherwise that environment variable would not exist.

pornel7mo ago

Apple got spooked by GPL v3 anti-tivoization clauses and stopped updating GNU tools in 2007.

macOS still has a bunch of GNU tools, but they appear to be incompatible with GNU tools used everywhere else, because they're so outdated.

wkat42427mo ago

And Apple is doing a lot of Tivoization these days. They're not yet actually stopping apps that they haven't "notarized" but they're not making it easier. One of the many reasons I left the Mac platform, both private and at work. The other reason was more and more reliance on the iCloud platform for new features (many of its services don't work on other OSes like Windows and Linux - I use all those too)

The problem with the old tools is that I don't have admin rights at work so it's not easy to install coreutils. Or even homebrew.

I can understand why they did it though. Too many tools these days advocate just piping some curl into a root shell which is pretty insane. Homebrew does this too.

flocked7mo ago

Couldn't you simply use macOS without the iCloud features? Which features require iCloud to work?

wkat42427mo ago

You can but there's just not much point anymore.

I don't remember all the specifics but every time there was a new macos I could cross most of the new features off. Nope this one requires iCloud or an apple ID. Nope this one only works with other macs or iPhones. Stuff like that. The Mac didn't use to be a walled garden. You can still go outside of their ecosystem (unlike on iOS) but then there's not much point. You're putting a square peg in a round hole.

Now, Apple isn't the only one doing this. Microsoft is making it ever harder to use windows without a Microsoft account. That's why I'm gravitating more and more to foss OSes. But there are new problems now, like with Firefox on Linux I constantly get captcha'd. M365 (work) blocks random features or keeps signing me out. My bank complains my system is not 'trusted'. Euh what about trusting your actual customers instead of a mega corp? I don't want my data locked in or monitored by a commercial party.

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jchw7mo ago

chasil7mo ago

There is some subtlety that you are missing here.

Outside of coreutils, let's consider bash and ksh88.

I've seen that useful GNU extensions are generally adopted by BSD, but much more slowly by POSIX.

That does not serve UNIX well. Someone should challenge the Austin Group for effective control of UNIX standardization.

jchw7mo ago

AFAIK, enabling POSIXLY_CORRECT doesn't get rid of any functionality. It changes some very subtle behaviors, such as the way certain argument parsing edge cases would be handled.

chasil7mo ago

Nope nope nope.

You can see this in a script by defining:

  alias p=printf

Then try to use it with bash. If bash is running as #!/bin/sh, then it will work, because bash is forced into POSIX mode.

However, if the script is running as #!/bin/bash, then you will be in the '80s behavior, and it will fail.

Try it.

1 more reply

skissaneOP7mo ago

> Pretty sure GNU coreutils really does intentionally deviate from POSIX compliance in a handful of places, otherwise POSIXLY_CORRECT wouldn't exist.

To get UNIX certification, you can just patch it to make POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 the default.

Or even don’t patch the utilities, and just patch /etc/profile to set POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 globally.

jchw7mo ago

pornel7mo ago

Apple got spooked by GPL v3 anti-tivoization clauses and stopped updating GNU tools in 2007.

macOS still has a bunch of GNU tools, but they appear to be incompatible with GNU tools used everywhere else, because they're so outdated.

wkat42427mo ago

The problem with the old tools is that I don't have admin rights at work so it's not easy to install coreutils. Or even homebrew.

I can understand why they did it though. Too many tools these days advocate just piping some curl into a root shell which is pretty insane. Homebrew does this too.

flocked7mo ago

Couldn't you simply use macOS without the iCloud features? Which features require iCloud to work?

wkat42427mo ago

You can but there's just not much point anymore.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse