But I really did think that since it was in Monterrey, it was going to stick around until at least macOS 13.

How long is long enough to avoid breaking something the users depend on? One more year? Five years? Fifty? I think we can all agree that it's reasonable to drop support at some point, making it just a question of when and at what cost.

10 years - a piece of software compiled with 'supported' libraries, SDKs and what have you should function for 10 years. An appliance or a service should function for 10 years and have spare parts avaliable for that long.

That is the guideline I ise as a consumer, if I can see that something won't last a decade, I won't be spending money or time on it if i can avoid it. At that point it's no longer a durable good, it's a consumable.

They could drop it with v12, or wait for v13, both would be fine. Dropping it in the middle of release cycle what people are objecting to.

I mean I already think it's... interesting that an operating system comes with (multiple) programming language interpreters, available to the end-user.

Apple is pretty aggressive about breaking backwards compatibility, as they did with x86, so it's no real surprise for unmaintained software to become completely unusable.

My company was shipping (somewhat niche) software linking with the built-in python2 up until last year though, and it’s been a scramble since Monterey to rebuild things to avoid the warning message. Definitely thought we would have python2 until 13.0 though (and part of me wonders whether this is just a “brown-out” for the beta and 12.3 release will be back to normal)

Yeah, fuck those end-users who might want to automate things with a script.

I am not to familiar with MacOS, but I imagine it comes with a bash/sh terminal? If so, then that is something that should be first choice for automation.

Everything else, be it python, perl, ruby or whatever should be installed by a user as needed.

Part of it is that it's just a mental burden to keep this kind of compatibility information in my brain. I have VMs set up of past macOS releases in case I need to run something old. I don't have VMs set up for earlier versions of a release, and I don't even know where I'd get an installer. Admittedly, in this case it would just be a matter of installing Python, but I don't necessarily know that as a user, or the software could need to be linked to Cocoa or some such.

NOTE: Debian 11 (bullseye) has removed the "python" package and the '/usr/bin/python' symlink due to the deprecation of Python 2.

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/Python#Python_in_Debian

* https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/python2

There has been no dropping of support: if you want Python 2.7 you can install in.

macOS is going the same way, except that Apple doesn't have a package manager so it has to be a manual installation.

There is no need for a manual installation.

Just to quote the literal slogan of homebrew:

>The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)

I think it is fair to say that Apple does in fact not have a package manager. Unless they do bundle homebrew with their OS nowadays?

> Apple doesn't have a package manager so it has to be a manual installation.

The quoted statement is clearly false. To maintain that python has to be installed by hand is incorrect.

Apple the corporation doesn’t have a package manager.

MacOS, the ecosystem does.

No different from Linux. There is no Linux package manager. There are numerous open source package managers for Linux.

macOS the OS has a package manager in terms of a tool to install packages. It does not have the ability to find/download packages to install though.

In the sense of a package manager being able to download and install additional software, macOS has several choices available but none of them are included with the OS, or have the ability to update the OS.

There is arguably no single "Linux ecosystem". There are numerous Linux-based distributions, which are largely comparable to macOS as an OS. One of the very key differences between each family of distro's is the package manager the OS ships with by default and uses to update itself.

So no. macOS does not "have" a package manager that's comparable to those included by default with linux distributions, but there are several third party package managers available for it.

A red herring that is nothing to do with what we are discussing.

> It does not have the ability to find/download packages to install though.

Another false statement. Homebrew is just as capable of searching as any Linux package manager.

I wasn't talking about homebrew.

It helps if you understand the comment before you reply to it and make accusations.

Edit to add, because fuck the HN timeouts. Heaven forbid someone make 6 comments in two fucking hours:

Try reading the whole fucking comment again, with the points being made really hammered home for you:

> macOS the OS has a package manager in terms of a tool to install packages. It does not have the ability to find/download packages to install though.

This is about the built in macOS package manager, that the OS itself uses to install packages. It's invoked via `installer` on the command line, or Installer.app in the GUI. It does not expose the ability to find/fetch packages from remote URLs.

> In the sense of a package manager being able to download and install additional software, macOS has several choices available but none of them are included with the OS, or have the ability to update the OS.

This is referring to homebrew, macports, etc.

We certainly do see things differently, because only one of us is repeatedly calling the other a liar due to poor reading comprehension.

This whole line of conversation is about whether it’s necessary to manually install python.

If you claim it is you are lying, because it can easily be installed via homebrew, and you are clearly aware of that.

If you have some need to claim that homebrew isn’t a MacOS package manager or that MacOS doesn’t “have” homebrew, because Apple doesn’t ship it. Go right ahead, but it’s a red herring.

Is faker.js a macOS vulnerability because there were people using Macs who installed npm and then installed faker.js? This isn't a theoretical question—whenever you install something, you need to consider where it's coming from and whether they can be trusted.

MacOS has homebrew as an open source package manager.

On Debian, packages in the official repositories are considered to be literally part of the Debian project. The maintainers are considered Debian maintainers, and bugs go into the Debian bug tracker.

This matters due to the trust issues I alluded to above. It also means that on Debian, there is one definitive version of Python (or at least one per Python version). The Homebrew, MacPorts, and Python.org Python binaries are all slightly different, such that it's possible for software to work with one but not the other.

However none of this has any relevance to the claim in question, which is that python must be installed manually.

MacOS certainly has a package manager that can install and maintain python.

Brew has a long history of treating any criticism of their truly woeful approach to security, dependency management etc, with "well fuck you we dont want to hear your opinion".

Everyone switched to brew even though it was the most poorly designed because it came from the Rails hype era where everyone wanted all their tools to be written in Ruby and didn’t care about anything else.

This meant if you wanted to install, say, ImageMagick, you would spend one day compiling stuff.

Also contributing a brew recipe was (and probably still is) easier than contributing to macports, and brew casks are pretty convenient.

I deeply dislike some of the choices of homebrew, but I can understand why it was popular, and it wasn't just because of the ruby hype.

Very HN: Business || technical. No concession for "Customer service."

You can't please everyone