MacOS X Dislikes

• The following packaged installations are incomplete:
  • Tcl Has tclsh (the Tcl scripting language interpreter) but not tclConfig.sh, so things i want to compile and install can't tell what the Tcl setup is.
  • tcp_wrappers does not seem to include libwrap.a (though other parts of tcp_wrappers are installed)
  • "locate," is installled, but missing is the "updatedb" shell script that rebuilds the database of files installed on the system.
• There doesn't seem to be any way to play a sound from the command line. (I could in NeXTSTEP 3.3...)
• Does not include bash or ksh. (But has sh, csh, tcsh and zsh)
• MacOS X only uses the first 8 charecters of the password, even though it accepts more. (For example, on the login panel, after you type past the eight character, it continues to accept and adds a dot for each new keystroke, even though it's not going to use these characters.) This suggest that passwords lengths are more robust than they truly are, which is misrepresenting the security of the OS.
• System paging is unacceptably poor on a 128 MB G3 if the main file system is UFS. (OK when it's HFS+)
• Difficult (impossible?) to swap on a raw device.
• References to programs and man pages that don't exist:
  • mach_swapon(2) in swaptab(5)
  • mach_swapon(8) in swaptab(5)
• Missing man pages:
  • CrashReporter
  • dynamic_pager
  • coreservicesd
  • WindowServer
  • ntpd
  • SystemStarter
  • kextd
  • configd
• Disagreement between man page a program behavior:
  • mount - does not use fstab as claimed in man page, even if lookupd is configured to check /etc/fstab.
• By default, no way to disable NFS client services (4 nfsiod's and automounter start if the network is configured. automount is also accepting data from the network via UDP on ports 668 and 671.)
• Default sendmail.cf broken. (sendmail refuses to start with a group-writable /)
• After coughing up $130 for a version of the OS with that many significant bugs, (10.1.4), i should not have to pay for un upgrade to 10.2.
• The 10.1 GUI feels slow, even compared to NeXTSTEP 3.3 running on a 33 MHz 68040, on a 400 MHZ PowerPC. This is just insane; the 400 MHz PowerPC should be about 100 times faster than the 33 MHz 68040.

$Id: dislikes.html,v 1.3 2002/09/01 10:25:32 johan Exp $