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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

The opening paragraph reads:

"Sometimes I think about all of those pictures which show a bunch of people in startups. They have their office space, which might be big, or it might be small, but they tend to have Macs. Lots of Macs. A lot of them also use git to do stuff, perhaps via GitHub, or via some other place entirely. There are lots of one-off repos all over the place."

If you can see a cheap shot in that paragraph, then you are reading things that aren't there. A blog post gives a certain amount of freedom for the author to elaborate on a theme.

You seem a bit defensive. I'm not sure why, but I certainly don't think that Rachel was attacking those who use Macs.

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I didn't get a negative vibe from the opening paragraph on its own. If you read the rest of the post, you find a lot of unnecessary negativity regarding the entire Apple ecosystem.

>> I know, I'll just strace it to see what it execs! Oh wait, this isn't Linux. Uh, I'll dtruss it to see what it execs!

Someone who is not in the process of bashing as much as possible would have simply said something like "I'll dtruss it (OS X's equivalent to Linux's strace) to see what it execs". All the exclamation marks and passive aggressive "Uh", "Oh wait", "Well, sorry" phrasing to drive home just how terribly awful the operating system is.

The closing section with the "If you rely on machines like this, I am truly sorry" sealed it. This clear dislike for the ecosystem adds - at least for me - new meaning to the opening paragraph. Typical startup bashing for "trying to be hip and trendy". It's hardware and an operating system. Everyone has a preference for the tools they use; there's no need for passive aggressive hostility.

All that first sentence points out is that Rachel was more familiar with Linux than OS X, and mistakenly thought that strace would be on the system, and then reverted to using dtruss. She's just showing her process for trying to troubleshoot Unix processes to see what is going on under the hood, in a conversational tone.

As for the "If you rely on machines like this, I am truly sorry" - I don't really blame her. She says she's sorry because she was trying to administer a system that a. has vulnerable software she couldn't easily upgrade or even remove, and b. some of the common utilities that she uses to troubleshoot Unix systems just don't work and this makes a competent Unix admin's life harder than it needs to be.

And Rachel, by all accounts, is a very competent - no, scratch that - talented administrator. So she feels the pain of not being able to use commonly available tools and not being able to keep systems as secure as she would like.

If you feel offended by this, then it seems to me you are actively looking to be offended and you have your own agenda.

The sentiment against OS X might not show that strong, but it is clearly there. She doesn't even mention that what protects /usr/bin is System Integrity Protection, or that it can be disabled. The very idea that people might not be using system git is not even mentioned.

All in all, it really feels as if it was written from the perspective of someone that does not usually work with OS X and does not know the system well. In other words, she has not done her homework. Which is fine, if you acknowledge what you don't know. But then the condescending tone would be totally out of place.

The sentiment is there, and it does not help in spreading the message, unless what you really want is to flare up all the emotions. Otherwise, it's not the best course of action.

Fun fact, since we're comparing default system installations, my Ubuntu apparently still has git 2.5.0. I suppose I should find some PPA or something to update it.

That point about Linux distros such as Ubuntu is something I was looking to mention, but I'm not 100% sure I have my facts straight. That said, here's what I believe is the case. ;)

The repositories can be similar to OS X in terms of providing really outdated versions of many packages. The same day Ubuntu releases a new version of the OS, packages can already be over a year out of date from the releases made by the software's developer.

The distros won't update the official repositories with newer versions of software once the version is pinned during the testing phase of the OS, due to the extensive amount of quality assurance that goes into ensuring system-wide stability. Their reasons are justified, but the end result still means you're typically not running the best and latest of anything.

Things are a little more difficult to understand with versioning in Linux. You may have git 2.5.0, but if you're on a release of the distro for which support is still ongoing, those CVEs are probably fixed due to backported security patches that don't bump the software's version number. In this manner, official repositories on Linux distros usually give you outdated software in terms of new features, but keep you entirely up to date in terms of security.

Information for Ubuntu in particular: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

And then... TIL about the backports repository: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

So what if there's a "sentiment against OS X"?

I've been using Macs for 30 years, including OS X since the 10.0 beta, and the recent changes have left me with a "sentiment against OS X" not unlike the "sentiment against Mac OS" that we had in the 90s when things went pear shaped.

There were people saying we shouldn't speak ill of System 7.5 back then, too.

OS X isn't a systemically marginalized group, it's a product that people are increasingly unhappy with. You may disagree as to why, or with the trade-offs involved, but we're not ignorant as you think we are; SIP likely isn't mentioned because it's obvious.

That git 2.5.0 on your ubuntu was patched about a month ago (to be exact: March 21, the same day Ubuntu published the advisory).

So fun fact indeed :)

I just checked my Ubuntu 14.04 and got this as an output:

    $ git --version
    git version 1.9.1

Unacceptable.

14.04 is an LTS release, which is, by definition, stable. 2.8.0 (latest, what I'm running) is vastly different from 1.9.1.

Stability is not the same thing as insecurity. As long as a stable release is supported, the maintainer promises to keep it secure. If your version of git had that vulnerability, Ubuntu would have backported the patches/fixes and made it available to you.

The version number 1.9.1 is a release identifier, not a security status identifier.

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