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What we know about Mac OS X Lion: That it will almost certainly break all the tools you need to run a local web development environment and be a pain to upgrade, but after a few months of weird hacks will go back to being a fabulous working environment for programmers.

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Really? Most of the standard web dev stuff (Ruby, PHP, Apache, etc.) comes out of the box and works quite well, and if you need either specialized versions of things (rvm, virtualenv, custom Apache, etc.) or stuff that doesn't come with OS X (lighttpd, node.js, etc.) wouldn't it be installed in /usr/local?

I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the transition smoothly.

It really depends. Is Xcode 3 supported in Lion?

With the Xcode 4 unix tools installed I had massive build problems with homebrew. Not being able to build mysql, node.js, thinking-sphinx, redis, mongo et al would constitute a pretty broken web dev environment, so if Lion requires the newer version, which most tools don't yet build cleanly under, that's a pretty big problem.

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