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Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

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Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#12

Post by blumomo »

polpo wrote: post #6
martius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, basically this news means "Ruby, python and Perl may not be preinstallled, install them yourself". It's not a big deal for users of Homebrew or other package managers.

It’s a big deal for Homebrew, which is written in Ruby and uses the version shipped with macOS to install itself.

I'm curious why this is a big deal. Naively, I'd suppose that they change their current install script from "ruby: download and install brew" to: "shell: download and install ruby, then install brew". They could even have their shell script download a package that installs both.

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#13

Post by qalmakka »

martius wrote: post #4
chmaynard wrote: post #3

If I use homebrew or macports to install the latest versions of these languages, are their runtimes included? Just asking.

Yes, basically this news means "Ruby, python and Perl may not be preinstallled, install them yourself". It's not a big deal for users of Homebrew or other package managers.

The only issue I see is that they'll have to change how brew bootstrap itself, but it should be trivial for them to just make the installer download a minimal ruby runtime.

One good upside from this deprecation is that lots of scripts naively containing "#!/bin/python" and such without invoking them through /usr/bin/env will stop working on macOS, which is good.

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#14

Post by acdha »

martius wrote: post #4
chmaynard wrote: post #3

If I use homebrew or macports to install the latest versions of these languages, are their runtimes included? Just asking.

Yes, basically this news means "Ruby, python and Perl may not be preinstallled, install them yourself". It's not a big deal for users of Homebrew or other package managers.

This really needs to be in every article about this: you’d want to use Homebrew anyway to get supported versions so this is a prod to stop trying to avoid it. Especially with things like Python 2.7 where some of the latter point releases had non-trivial improvements for TLS, etc. it really wasn’t worth it staying behind — and I say that as someone who used to ship Mac management tools using Python many years ago.

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#17

Post by weberc2 »

cstross wrote: post #2

About bloody time! Apple don't keep their scripting languages updated. For example, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 ships with perl 5, version 18, subversion 4 (v5.18.4) in /usr/bin/perl; but my homebrew setup provides perl 5, version 30, subversion 0 (v5.30.0). (And for those who don't know perl, it's been semi-permanently pinned at "perl 5" as a major version number for about 20 years due to the existence of perl 6, which is…

Whoa, I’ve been using Mac for almost a decade and I never knew it shipped with perl!

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#18

Post by paranoidrobot »

goatinaboat wrote: post #9

scripts are just text files that can do a great deal when executed by the scripting language runtime Microsoft have done a lot in Windows 10 to counter PowerShell malware https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/poshchap/2015/10/16/secu... https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2017/12/04/windows-d... It’s not foolproof but it copes with many common attacks. It’s surprising Apple hasn’t taken this approach.

To do so would run counter to the "Mac's don't get viruses/malware" mythology.

There's been a persistent "That's only a PC thing" for a long time. Fairly sure it was even referenced in Apple's own advertising during the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" phase.

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#19

Post by ingve »

weberc2 wrote: post #17
cstross wrote: post #2

About bloody time! Apple don't keep their scripting languages updated. For example, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 ships with perl 5, version 18, subversion 4 (v5.18.4) in /usr/bin/perl; but my homebrew setup provides perl 5, version 30, subversion 0 (v5.30.0). (And for those who don't know perl, it's been semi-permanently pinned at "perl 5" as a major version number for about 20 years due to the existence of perl 6, which is…

Whoa, I’ve been using Mac for almost a decade and I never knew it shipped with perl!

It was even used in some unexpected places, for example, see the HN discussion about "Apple's libc shells out to Perl to implement wordexp" [0], [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025572

[1] https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae7464771...

Re: Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

#20

Post by snazz »

weberc2 wrote: post #17
cstross wrote: post #2

About bloody time! Apple don't keep their scripting languages updated. For example, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 ships with perl 5, version 18, subversion 4 (v5.18.4) in /usr/bin/perl; but my homebrew setup provides perl 5, version 30, subversion 0 (v5.30.0). (And for those who don't know perl, it's been semi-permanently pinned at "perl 5" as a major version number for about 20 years due to the existence of perl 6, which is…

Whoa, I’ve been using Mac for almost a decade and I never knew it shipped with perl!

Most Unix systems do. Apple just does a terrible job of keeping scripting runtimes up to date.
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