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The Challenges Of Integrating Unix And Mac OS
Schemer writes: "Wilfredo Sánchez, the lead developer on Darwin has posted his usenix paper, 'The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments' on the Web. In it he describes the difficulties and solutions to the problems encountered while trying to adapt BSD Unix for use with MacOS X. It's a very good read, even if you aren't a fan of the Macintosh." The OS X team have been dealing with the serious complications of mixing one established, beloved interface with another -- this is a thoughtful look from the inside at how they've dealt with it, and a good explanation of some underlying assumptions and conventions of each OS.
Mac OS is built like a tank in the areas that really count in the area of average user computing. A program can be installed at any time and that won't kill other, existing programs. Similarly, a program that is already installed will never preclude another program from being installed (like RPM does). And if you delete all the mac OS configuration files, programs can still run. How many times has someone installed one windows program and this has totally killed another working program? Or the registry got corrupted in one particular area and dragged other areas down with it? Or how many times has someone has tried installing a linux application, only to find out they have to screw around with environment variables to even get the program to start up. Mac OS doesn't have these problems, and in the Reality That Is The Average Joe Consumer Desktop(tm), crashing is far less of a concern than something not running at all or something screwing up the computer. A crash in this area of computing is an annoyance, something failing to work at all is completely unacceptable.
/etc, on windows delete the registry, and on MacOS, trash the preferences folder. Reboot and see which computer has the most functionality that an average computer user requires. Guarentee you it won't be the first two. Which is unfortunate since it would be great if linux and windows had the system/application integrity that consumer level usage requires. True, anyone geek enough could fix the first two computers, but keep in mind that most average joe computer users are not like us geeks.
Let's do a test. On a unix system, do rm -rf