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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#251

Post by dekz »

Watabou wrote: post #237
dekz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently received a new MBPr from a work laptop and I would totally agree it takes days to setup from scratch. * It takes hours to download Xcode * It takes hours to download OSX Updates * Setting up Homebrew, Zsh, Vim, Browsers, GitHub, Dropbox, Mail, Rbenv, Rubies, Cloning work repos * Getting those other smaller things you were tinkering with, Z, Go Everyones dev setup is different. So I'd agree it takes days to…

Huh, I'm not sure why you say it takes "hours", it takes about 15 minutes for me to download it on a 50Mbps and that's not exactly fast. When you get a new machine, at most you'll be one or two point updates down, and you can just use a combo updater, again, about 15 minutes to download, another 15 minutes to update. Every one has their own dotfiles set up but I have a script that pulls my dotfiles, installs every pa…

> Huh, I'm not sure why you say it takes "hours" Because it took me hours. I don't understand, I'm telling my anecdote and people seem to be saying it's wrong.

Just because it takes you 15 minutes doesn't mean it takes me or everyone else 15 minutes.

It took me days to be happy with my dev environment.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#252

Post by walshemj »

nknighthb wrote: post #249
walshemj wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS, Raspberry pi hell it even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k.

> Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past. > even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.

Well I never had problems and the problems I had with mac where with basic stuff like the Perl MySQL DBI.

In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM.

After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#253

Post by klibertp »

sanderjd wrote: post #250
klibertp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is very interesting and enjoyable, but it's also quite hard. The road from idea to implementation is often long and filled with obstacles. It's well worth it to spend some time "fiddling" to remove some of them. In truth, I personally am not very interested in tinkering with config files - it's boring and frustrating at times - but I still do it . I feel it's my duty as a professional as well as a pride a…

Interesting perspective! I think the analogy to refactoring is also apt. Keeping tools sharp is good, but (quickly, in my opinion) hits a point of diminishing returns. Refactoring is even better but also eventually hits that point (much less quickly).

> but (quickly, in my opinion) hits a point of diminishing returns.

That's certainly true - it depends on the tools you use and problems you use them to solve, but sooner or later you'll see your "sharpening" stop giving you any advantage. That's the moment you should just stop :) And maybe try other tools: but that's always a non-trivial time investment and should be done only after making sure there actually is something to be gained from the switch.

This is true in most other areas as well. For example, I'm collecting knives as a hobby. I had to learn how to care for them and sharpen them. It's incredible how sharp you can make a knife given proper tools - whetstones ans stropping - you can get an edge which is sharper than any scalpel or razor. It's also a complete waste of time to do so: it takes hours to make a knife that sharp and it takes one or two cuts to dull it. Granted, my "dulled" edge is probably still sharper than anything you ever saw ;) but in the end I get the same edge I'd get without those extra hours spent on polishing it. It then stays that way for quite a long time. It took me years to learn how much sharpening is "good enough". Now, for my primary pocket folding knife, I spend 15-30 minutes sharpening it per week and get an edge I can trust.

It's the same in programming. Both sharpening knives and tinkering with programming tools can be pleasant by itself. It takes practice to recognize that "good enough" is actually really ok and that anything more than that is a waste of time. Still, I can't imagine not sharpening my knives at all. Or giving them to someone else for sharpening. The very idea seems crazy to me.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#255

Post by teacup50 »

antimagic wrote: post #186
teacup50 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because /usr/local doesn't belong to homebrew and is not appropriate for homebrew to commandeer. MacPorts was originally written by the BSD team at Apple; if /usr/local was where a packaging system was supposed to stuff itself on OS X, they would have used it -- instead of /opt/local. The co-opting of /use/local breaks all kinds of stuff -- for instance, /usr/local/lib is in the default linker search path and can't b…

I disagree. / is where the stuff needed for single-user mode gets installed. /usr is where the OS's userland stuff gets installed. On Linux systems this includes everything that you get from your package manager, because this is considered to be part of your system. /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it. Or if I'm b…

> On a Mac, there is no system-blessed pacakage manager ...

Which is one very big reason why commandeering /usr/local for a single package manager is inappropriate; it means that your 3rd-party package manager cannot share the system with any other 3rd-party package manager.

To re-iterate -- the BSD team, who maintained hier(7), very intentionally didn't put MacPorts in /usr/local.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#256

Post by eropple »

tvon wrote: post #247
eropple wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is installing stuff from source, though. It's automating the task of me doing it.

Well, it usually installs from source, but that's not really the point. It's a package manager, it is trivial to give it it's own home, (and thankfully they made that an easy thing to do), but to throw it in that /usr/local bucket by default? It seems like a decision that requires real justification and the reasons I have seen seem pretty weak. I mean, in the end it seems like almost nobody cares, but it's always bee…

I get what you're saying, but /usr/local is where I install stuff. I'm happy with having the thing that does little more than untangle my dependencies before running `make` for me with sane defaults use it too.

I expect to find system-specific applications in /usr/local. I get the argument otherwise, and it has merit, but not enough to not do it, if you get me.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#257

Post by nknighthb »

walshemj wrote: post #252
nknighthb wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past. > even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.

Well I never had problems and the problems I had with mac where with basic stuff like the Perl MySQL DBI. In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM. After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.

Well, I've actually tried it with the included OS X Perl, and I can't seem to find a problem.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/d69f5b0cee13102a9167

So, I've satisfied your request, "Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL". I guess that means you admit OS X "can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can"?

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#258

Post by nknighthb »

aftbit wrote: post #139
morganvachon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the joke, and it was the first thing that popped in my head too. But in all seriousness, OS X is Unix as well, and can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the one you already own.

Unfortunately, it has terrible filesystem support. How do I read/write ext4 volumes!?

Have you tried "brew install ext4fuse" ?

Edit: Seems it's still read-only. If you need write support that badly (why?), there's always Paragon: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#259

Post by msie »

Fiddling around with rvm I tried to install the latest ruby on OSX. Well, something in "brew" broke so I tried to do a "brew update" but got an error with that. Then according to an SO entry I should "git reset" the local git repo used by "brew". Why do developers put up with this shit?

Edit: I just discovered "brew doctor" and I had to use it. Ugh. Showing lots of warnings that I have to wade through...

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#260

Post by sanderjd »

klibertp wrote: post #253
sanderjd wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting perspective! I think the analogy to refactoring is also apt. Keeping tools sharp is good, but (quickly, in my opinion) hits a point of diminishing returns. Refactoring is even better but also eventually hits that point (much less quickly).

> but (quickly, in my opinion) hits a point of diminishing returns. That's certainly true - it depends on the tools you use and problems you use them to solve, but sooner or later you'll see your "sharpening" stop giving you any advantage. That's the moment you should just stop :) And maybe try other tools: but that's always a non-trivial time investment and should be done only after making sure there actually is som…

Your story about the knives is interesting, because it sounds like all you really need is one (or maybe even zero - I'm not sure what you're doing with them) "good enough" knife, but you enjoy having a bunch and tinkering with them. That's great, and sounds pretty fun. My point in this thread has just been that at some point I realized all I really need is a simple development setup, and that I don't particularly enjoy tinkering with it.
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