Tag Archives: Mac

Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a Major Bug Fix Release

Posted on by
3

I’m looking forward to the release of the next version of Mac OS X, version 10.6 Snow Leopard this September. As a Software Quality Assurance (QA) practitioner, I find it particularly interesting that this major release is basically a bug fix release — “lots of refinements” and upgrades to the architecture.

The Apple press release from last June includes:

… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.

I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.

Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.

Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.

People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.

Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.

Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.

If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.

Attack of the Case Sensitive Filesystem

Posted on by
18

Case sensitive file systems should be retired.

They allow us to do stupid things, mostly in error, but sometimes because we are too smart for our own good. There is no good reason for their (continued) existence.

I imagine that in the ancient days of computing it came about something like:

“Long file names will take up too much space”

“I know, we can make the file system case sensitive.”

“Great, now instead of ‘work-notes.txt’ and ‘notes-about-homebuilding.txt’, I’ll just name the files ‘notes’ and ‘Notes”.

Software developers are known for our passion for backward compatibility, and so today the popular file systems of Linux and Unix (except Mac) are still case sensitive.

Gross!

What has gotten me worked up about this (again)?

The cause this time is a customer checked into subversion two copies of a file just with different case. From the commit log, it seems likely that they meant to rename the file.

When I tried to update (or check out) the repository on Mac OS X (10.5.6), a case preserving, but case-insensitive file system (doing the right thing), it fails with a cryptic message:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't copy 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base' to 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/belief.jpg.tmp.tmp': No such file or directory

using the pre-packaged svn 1.4.4 (r25188 – built Nov 25 2007). Out of interest, I used macports to upgrade to 1.5.5 (r34862) and the error is different but equally cryptic:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't open file 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base': No such file or directory

At this point, I had not identified the cause of the problem, so I was quite frustrated. Thankfully, I had a Linux box to check out the repository on and from there the issue looked obvious.

Solutions?

Save us from our selves.

When working on developing the next great file system, make it so amazing that you can slip in case preserving, case insensitivity like Mac OS X’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended).

When developing tools like the next great revision control system don’t allow files of the same name but different case — the default configuration anyway.  Failing that, have good error messages. 

It’s not too late for Subversion either to fix the long rotten issue 667: handle file name case sensitivity edge cases (issue 2010: case sensitivity problem with checkout )

Update April 2, 2011: two years later, newer version of Mac OS X, and SVN, and I encounter the same problem:

$ svn up
svn: In directory 'macleans3/images/maps'
svn: Can't open file 'macleans3/images/maps/.svn/tmp/textbase/BQ_old.png.svn-base': No such file or directory

lloyd-imac:macleans3 lloyd$ svn cleanup
svn: In directory 'images/maps'
svn: Error processing command 'modify-wcprop' in 'images/maps'
svn: 'images/maps/bq_old.png' is not under version control

Again, after looking around for easy solutions on the Mac, I just logged into a Linux box, and checked out there, removed the duplicate file names, and committed.

Tech Frustration

Posted on by
2

I’ve always been good at finding the cracks in things and breaking them wide open. This is one of the reasons why I enjoy testing software. I also have a high threshold for technology acting up and the disposition, skills, and resources (friends) to fix it, but lately I’ve been a little tech frustrated.

Continue reading →