<story><title>macOS Sonoma Broke Grep</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/738862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gempir</author><text>This is really weird thing to complain about.&lt;p&gt;When your partner builds her entire dev environment against a very specific version, packages etc. and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version? If you don&amp;#x27;t put any effort into using containers, vms or even just basic setup scripts then yeah this will not work out.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve worked with a few physicists and they are scientists first and developers second. Which is okay, but will lead to janky setups that you cannot simply upgrade the OS under.&lt;p&gt;I want actual updates of my OS and don&amp;#x27;t want to be stuck forever on some specific version of openssh because some Astrophysicist decides to built her dev environment against it.&lt;p&gt;So either build a reproducible dev environment or don&amp;#x27;t complain that you cannot update without issues.</text></item><item><author>mjsweet</author><text>My partner is an Astrophysicist who relies on Gnu Emacs as her daily driver. Her work involves managing a treasure trove of legacy code written in a variety of languages like Fortran, Matlab, IDL, and IRAF. This code is essential for her data reduction pipelines, supporting instruments across observatories such as Keck 1 &amp;amp; 2, the AAT, Gemini, and more.&lt;p&gt;Each time she acquires a new Mac, she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch. It&amp;#x27;s not because she enjoys it; rather, it&amp;#x27;s a necessity because the built-in migration assistant just doesn&amp;#x27;t cut it for her specialised needs.&lt;p&gt;While she currently wields the power of an M1 Max MacBook Pro and runs on the Monterey operating system, she tends to stick with the pre-installed OS for the lifespan of her hardware, which often spans several years. In her case, this could be another 2-3 years or even more before she retires the machine or hands it over to a postdoc or student.&lt;p&gt;But why does she avoid the annual OS upgrades? It&amp;#x27;s simple. About a decade ago, every OS update would wreak havoc on her meticulously set-up environment. Paths would break, software would malfunction, and libraries that used to reside in one place mysteriously migrated to another. The headache and disruptions were just not worth it.&lt;p&gt;She decided to call it quits on annual OS upgrades roughly 7-8 years ago. While I&amp;#x27;ve suggested Docker as a potential solution, it still requires her to take on the role of administrator and caretaker, which, in her busy world of astrophysical research, can be quite the distraction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>impendia</author><text>I am an academic mathematician, and I&amp;#x27;ve noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.&lt;p&gt;In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it&amp;#x27;s your responsibility to update those too. Hence software &amp;quot;maintenance&amp;quot;, which requires a lot of effort.&lt;p&gt;In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it&amp;#x27;s done it&amp;#x27;s done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: &amp;quot;By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore...&amp;quot; You don&amp;#x27;t have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of &amp;quot;quasiregular&amp;quot;, or renumber everything.&lt;p&gt;Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.</text></comment>
<story><title>macOS Sonoma Broke Grep</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/738862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gempir</author><text>This is really weird thing to complain about.&lt;p&gt;When your partner builds her entire dev environment against a very specific version, packages etc. and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version? If you don&amp;#x27;t put any effort into using containers, vms or even just basic setup scripts then yeah this will not work out.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve worked with a few physicists and they are scientists first and developers second. Which is okay, but will lead to janky setups that you cannot simply upgrade the OS under.&lt;p&gt;I want actual updates of my OS and don&amp;#x27;t want to be stuck forever on some specific version of openssh because some Astrophysicist decides to built her dev environment against it.&lt;p&gt;So either build a reproducible dev environment or don&amp;#x27;t complain that you cannot update without issues.</text></item><item><author>mjsweet</author><text>My partner is an Astrophysicist who relies on Gnu Emacs as her daily driver. Her work involves managing a treasure trove of legacy code written in a variety of languages like Fortran, Matlab, IDL, and IRAF. This code is essential for her data reduction pipelines, supporting instruments across observatories such as Keck 1 &amp;amp; 2, the AAT, Gemini, and more.&lt;p&gt;Each time she acquires a new Mac, she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch. It&amp;#x27;s not because she enjoys it; rather, it&amp;#x27;s a necessity because the built-in migration assistant just doesn&amp;#x27;t cut it for her specialised needs.&lt;p&gt;While she currently wields the power of an M1 Max MacBook Pro and runs on the Monterey operating system, she tends to stick with the pre-installed OS for the lifespan of her hardware, which often spans several years. In her case, this could be another 2-3 years or even more before she retires the machine or hands it over to a postdoc or student.&lt;p&gt;But why does she avoid the annual OS upgrades? It&amp;#x27;s simple. About a decade ago, every OS update would wreak havoc on her meticulously set-up environment. Paths would break, software would malfunction, and libraries that used to reside in one place mysteriously migrated to another. The headache and disruptions were just not worth it.&lt;p&gt;She decided to call it quits on annual OS upgrades roughly 7-8 years ago. While I&amp;#x27;ve suggested Docker as a potential solution, it still requires her to take on the role of administrator and caretaker, which, in her busy world of astrophysical research, can be quite the distraction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrweasel</author><text>While I can see some minor issues with version upgrades, some software simply have breaking changes, but mostly I&amp;#x27;m surprised when people manages to create environments that are really locked to a single OS version.&lt;p&gt;It used to happen on Windows quite a bit, through now fault of Microsoft. People for one reason or another sometimes see to go out of their way to ensure that their software is tied entirely to one specific version of one operating system.&lt;p&gt;We dealt with a customer who could upgrade a server, required to use newer TLS versions, but their custom software was pretty much locked to Windows Server 2008. They couldn&amp;#x27;t even build the software on something newer. I quite honestly don&amp;#x27;t know how people keep ending up in that situation. I don&amp;#x27;t think they do it on purpose, but the way they insist on working just makes things work out that way.</text></comment>