He likely had some old Macports or whatever binaries lying around in his $PATH (it was that for me the last time some libs didn't compile). Would Linux be immune to that, if you had 2 concurrent pkg managers?
You could probably run vanilla macOS in a VM without running into any problems.
> He likely had some old Macports or whatever binaries lying around in his $PATH (it was that for me the last time some libs didn't compile).
He only ever used Homebrew as far as I know.
> Would Linux be immune to that, if you had 2 concurrent pkg managers?
How would that ever happen?
Replace Mac with Windows and you've got the same problem. It's the junior's fault for trying to fight the system.
The difference is that on Windows, most developers expect Unix applications to just not work. (The fine print: I can't comment on WSL.) But macOS was always sold (by other developers) as "the intuitive UI plus the power of Unix", so I'd expect to get Unix applications going with a negligible amount of yak-shaving, esp. something like Rails that is used by latte-sipping Mac hipsters across the world.
Shit like this is why I do all my development in a VirtualBox with Arch Linux. While my co-workers argue about the best way to install Docker on their Macs, I just `pacman -S docker && systemctl start docker` and get on with my life.