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> This is why we can’t have nice things--random reports of things not working are pretty meaningless without context

No they are not. A lot of the same reports with same combination of htop + iTerm should prompt the company to investigate. At least when they are selling $2k "premium" machines.

> I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware

Neither did I except since I upgraded to High Sierra, happened within an hour after.

> it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem.

Usually is. So who from Apple is investigating what is not being reported. It seems like after enough people seeing the issue, they'd prioritize it a bit.

> Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change?

Even if htop doesn't work correctly, and is complete garbage it doesn't install kernel extension and doesn't run with admin privileges so it shouldn't freeze the machine or render it unusable which is seems to do.

> it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news;

The corollary there is that to make the news and get the attention, would need to build a narrative. In many cases with large companies with lots of consumers the best way to solve a problem is to make a big stink on the social media. It's unfortunate but because it's effective, that's what people use.

> but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is.

For people who see their expensive machines which used to work, stop working is pretty bad. Had these been some no-name $150 cheapo chromebooks there wouldn't be such a big deal.

And this issue might not be as serious, but you do recall the "root party" vulnerability, just a month or so ago? That was actually pretty bad, wouldn't you say? And at some point the effect is cumulative. One thing after another starts to get to people. So people will let off steam online about it.

> This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.

One is a non-profit foundation and another is a company with almost $800B in capital. There is a slight difference and different expectations there as well.

> doesn't run with admin privileges

To run correctly on macOS and display all processes htop needs to be root via sudo/setuid.

No they are not. A lot of the same reports with same combination of htop + iTerm should prompt the company to investigate.

You don’t know whether or not they’ve investigated this issue or not.

There’s a decent chance they have, which might explain why I haven’t had this problem because I’m running a beta of 10.13.3 and nobody else on the GitHub thread is as far as I can see.

I also haven’t seen evidence of bug reports to Apple; that might’ve helped: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

> You don’t know whether or not they’ve investigated this issue or not.

True, because the company we're discussing isn't exactly the champion of communication when it comes to things like that. A simple reply from an Apple developer that it is being looked into, that it got linked to an internal KB, would've been suffice.

One is a non-profit foundation and another is a company with almost $800B in capital. There is a slight difference and different expectations there as well.

1. You’re confusing Apple’s market capitalization (around $890 billion) with it’s cash on hand + marketable securities , which is only $268 billion: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/02/earnings-4q-2017/

Regardless, it’s not relevant to this discussion since we know all of these companies who make tens of billions each quarter have bugs and security issues.

Given your logic, there’s no excuse for Intel creating vulnerable processors going back to 1997, with literally hundreds of millions of computers that can be compromised and hacked. It wouldn’t take more than a few percent of these machines to be hacked to potentially cause havoc all over the world.

The point being: money doesn’t mean you can’t screw up; being a non-profit doesn’t let you off the hook. It’s not crazy to expect the FreeBSD team to say more than “we’ll get back to you” regarding fixes. At least the Linux guys are dealing: http://www.zdnet.com/article/major-linux-redesign-in-the-wor...

FreeBSD also doesn’t have over 1 billion vulnerable devices in the wild either; their threat model is tiny compared to what Apple and the rest of Intel’s OEM’s have to deal with.

I know, I know: Apple is always held to a different standard; they should give equal weight to an incorrect compiler flag for htop as they would for preventing more than 1 billion of their smartphones, tablets and computers from being hacked.

> I know: Apple is always held to a different standard;

That's exactly what I was getting to. They should be held to a different standard.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/63985/

They were notified in late December, before the holidays. Intel knew for 6 months at least. So even there some vendors had more time than others.

Even if htop doesn't work correctly, and is complete garbage it doesn't install kernel extension and doesn't run with admin privileges so it shouldn't freeze the machine or render it unusable which is seems to do.

Turns out it doesn’t, but it’s not unusual for people to make these types of unsubstantiated claims; turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra.

The Homebrew team updated the formula so it doesn’t try to install on High Sierra until they can fix it.

Speaking of making unsubstantiated claims: this post is totally untrue. The formula was not updated with an OS requirement due to some misconstrued build issue; installation on High Sierra was blocked 6 hours ago, as noted in the very issue thread that this HN topic is about [0], explicitly because the freezes and crashes are very real and reproducible.

[0]: https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/issues/682#issuecomment-355...

> Turns out it doesn’t, but it’s not unusual for people to make these types of unsubstantiated claims

What are the unsubstantiated claims? That these people including me are lying and have made this crash up? Do you really believe that?

> turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra.

Thanks for checking, but what is the build issue is exactly?

The original point was that unless htop installs kernel extensions or runs as admin it shouldn't break the rest of the system. So there might be an htop issue but there is most likely a macOS issue as well.

Whatever the system issue was is fixed for some and certainly for me on 10.13.2 or newer when running htop.

> Was this a clean install or was it upgraded from a previous version of macOS?

You do realize, don't you, that if this is a relevant question I already have cause to complain? It's been the future for some time now, give us reliable upgrades already.

You do realize, don't you, that if this is a relevant question I already have cause to complain? It's been the future for some time now, give us reliable upgrades already.

Yes, it’s the future, but as I mentioned, the Mac I’m running High Sierra on is nearly 10 years-old—it shipped with a version of Snow Leopard, MacOS x 10.6.

That was 7 major operating system releases ago—pretty sure nobody at Apple tested upgrading from an operating system that hasn’t been supported by Apple in many years, not to mention all of the permutations of hardware, kernel extensions, file systems, 3rd-party software installs, etc.

This is the double-edged sword: no matter what Apple does, they’re wrong. If they don’t support older machines with the latest operating system, then it’s a conspiracy to force its users to upgrade.

If they do support older machines and can’t guarantee perfect upgrades from every version operating system they’ve ever shipped, regardless of the condition of the user’s machine and how well (or not) the machine has been maintained, they’re also wrong.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying they should have solved it anyway. For a company that prides itself on (and charges for) high quality user friendly products, reliable software upgrades should be foundational. The double-edged sword argument only makes sense if you assume it's impossible, when in fact it's only the preventable (given Apple's control) accumulation of cruft that makes it expensive. Upgrades certainly would have made a better investment than removing headphone jacks, or adding the touch bar, or almost anything that went into High Sierra.

Yeah, I'm an idealist. Sue me.

> If they do support older machines and can’t guarantee perfect upgrades from every version operating system they’ve ever shipped, regardless of the condition of the user’s machine and how well (or not) the machine has been maintained, they’re also wrong.

Yes, a $50 billion company that doesn't run massive amounts of automated regression tests on one of its flagship products is Wrong. Come on, Microsoft manages to support absurd levels of backwards compatibility (see the discussion upthread about upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10), what's Apple's excuse?

Turns out there’s some kind of build issue with htop; the Homebrew formula has been modified to not install on High Sierra.

Here’s what I got when attempting to upgrade; for the record, htop still works fine for me:

    ==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result:
    htop 2.0.2_1
    htop: This formula either does not compile or function as expected on macOS versions newer than Sierra due to an upstream incompatibility.
    Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.

Yeah, that's done as a result of this linked bug report. Its mentioned in the bug report somewhere at the bottom.

You can silence the error by running "brew pin htop". Remember to "brew unpin htop" when/if the bug is finally fixed.

You should blame whoever gave advance notice to Apple and allowed them to patch the issue, but didn't do the same for FreeBSD.