Slashdot Mirror
Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death"
Z80xxc! writes "Some Mac users upgrading to Apple's new Leopard operating system are encountering long delays on reboot — an experience they liken to the Windows 'Blue Screen of Death.' While some of those upgrading were able to access their computer after waiting for as long as several hours, others were forced to do a complete reinstall. Some suspect that a framework called 'Application Enhancer' by Unsanity LLC may be causing the problem, but there has been no official word from Apple at this point."
Archive and install!
It's the safest way to upgrade. Yes, it's less convenient, but way better than finding out that some 3rd party tweak is not compatible the hard way...
Using APE is an insanity of the first order anyway. Dealing with Unsanity's refusal to help is what made me dump all their products.
... " ... "
Me: "Hi APE is causing crashes on my mac"
Unsanity: "No it's not, it can't. This is why.... "
Me: "OK, that makes sense thanks"
two weeks later
Me: "Hi, APE definitely is causing crashes on my mac"
Unsanity: "No, it can't be, because... "
Me: "I just did a fresh install. it survived multiple reboots in its completely standard configuration. I installed APE, now X, Y and Z all crash"
Unsanity: "Well it's not APE, because APE does
Me: "I removed APE, and instantly it's working again"
Unsanity: "Well it can't be APE, because
Me: "Fuck you"
This is hardly the first time Unsanity's stuff has caused problems with a new version of OS X. If people are too damned dumb to uninstall their unsupported-hack add-ons before upgrading, that's their problem, not Apple's.
And no matter how much better OS X is than Windows w/r/t the "it just works" aspect, things can and do still go wrong sometimes. A little pre-upgrade basic system maintenance never hurts (at least repair permissions and verify/repair the target disk from Disk Utility on the Leopard CD), and neither does making a bootable clone of the system in case you have to revert.
~Philly
You have a bunch of people who don't have anything to do with the author of an application writing code that mass-modifies dozens of applications, libraries, etc., essentially doing binary patching on the running OS.
I've done that as well. I mean, binary patching the actual OS, not just applications running in userland. Sometimes you gotta do it.
If you knew what GNU libc does to try and avoid having to make people rebuild applications when upgrading libraries, you'd run screaming. They have code in there to look for libraries at runtime and dynamically load different variants of other libraries depending on what you're using and what you have installed. The glibc team has people who do nothing but look for cases where they have to adapt for different libraries and different kernel versions.
The reason that you don't have more of a problem on Linux is that there's no central Steve Jobs for Linux who dictates the way the GUI works, so if you don't like the way Enlightenment or fvwm or Windowmaker behaves, you can change it. The downside of this is that there's no single framework you can modify or replace to make global changes. There used to be, back when everyone used Athena Widgets, and you could replace libXaw with libXaw95 to get a Windows 95 look, or with libXawSTeP to get a NeXTSTeP look. Now, instead, you get Battluin GUIs between the Gnome and KDE yobbos.
And there's all kinds of Windows hacks that do similar stuff to APE, from development tools to simple user interface enhancements. And, yes, they can cause problems and break in new versions of the OS.
What Unsanity has done is to create a framework that makes this kind of thing relatively safe compared to having everyone build their own. Unfortunately since they're not at Apple or someone that Apple is willing to support (because they are undoing the things that The Steve has decreed) there's an unhealthy passive-aggressive relationship between Apple and Unsanity that doesn't exist between (say) Debian and the glibc team.
And, yes, they should be disabling themselves on upgrade. And Apple should look at the things that people are using Haxies for and make the things they are trying to get rid of optional.
The other thing is, on Windows people simply don't put their trust in having an upgrade work. They do clean installs. And they wait on upgrading Windows until this kind of thing gets shaken out.