I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context.

This isn’t like a bug that was introduced in the beta, and betas are intended to help find bugs.

This is functionality deliberately being removed, that is wildly known to break cloud storage software.

> I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context.

Not OP, but it means you should expect beta software to be broken and incomplete.

How would you know this isn't due to a bug introduced in the beta? Seems as likely an explanation as anything else at this point, unless you have some inside information.

A lot of things use a "plugin" organization, and if a certain plugin was missing -- say, due to bug leading to a failed compile, the tool would work fine but the functionality provided by the plugin would simply be missing. Not that I have any insight into this particular case, but just pointing out there are perfectly reasonable ways a bug could cause this.

Also, I've personally disabled features in a beta release when I knew the feature was broken and it would cause long term issues if someone tried to use the broken feature (like data corruption). So it could be deliberately removed but only temporarily.

Or maybe Apple just removed this to be dicks, IDK... But I don't think you do either, do you?

If you do have inside info, can you let us know whyx this was removed?

It's not a "bug" - I ran `strings /usr/bin/fileproviderctl` on 14.3 and 14.4 and you can clearly see that the commands and their related helptext have been completely removed.

If they had disabled those commands at source level (e.g. with the preprocessor) then that’s exactly what you’d expect to see. But we don’t know why they disabled them, yes it could be a rug pull, but it could also be because there was a serious known bug when the deadline for the beta came around and it was safer to temporarily disable the commands rather than leave them in. We don’t know the dynamics at play, there could be a bug in some upstream component and whoever is responsible for this tool doesn’t have any choice but to disable it while they wait for the fix.

It would have been nice if they left a note of explanation but… Apple.

I think Apple got themselves in that position. Features many people relied on did go away lots of times before. Basic things are broken and Apple doesn't care. (dtrace is broken in latest 2 major versions of the system, same for system settings search) At this point, if some functionality disappears, it's not totally unreasonable to expect that it's Apple being Apple.

Most likely because that isn't the main tracing tool for quite some time now, rather Instruments.

Creating Custom Instruments - WWDC 2018

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/410/

Yes, there isn't feature parity per se with DTrace, since when it was an impediment for Apple to replace some set of APIs or tooling?

I'd be less annoyed about this one if they just removed dtrace if they don't want to fix it and replaced it with "echo 'use Instruments'". But that's not the case - dtrace will currently crash your whole system if you try to use it on M2/M3. They also acknowledged it's a bug months ago.

The purpose of making a beta publicly available is so people outside the company can try it out, find what’s broken, and report on it.

That’s exactly what’s happening here. The poster found an issue, reported it to Apple, then commented on it publicly so others who depend on it could be made aware and also report it to Apple (they specifically say duplicate reports help).

Removing critical functions isn't a necessary part pod being beta, so no, betas can be betas without that