Apple, WTF is wrong with you?
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Apparently, their QA is out to lunch. Which is to be expected, since in most corporations QA departments are seen as a cost sink and a major nuisance, and all it takes for shit to hit the fan is for a bookkeeper to became their CEO.
According to a report here, if you're using their shiny new APFS with sparse bundle disk images, you're going to lose data, big time. Which wouldn't be such a big deal unless APFS was forced down on users like it's a properly tested, mature piece of a file system.
The errors and data loss is tied to the new shiny features like copy-on-write and all the associated creative bookkeeping tied to free space calculations.
I would expect that such a bug appeared on a custom niche type of RAID hardware which tries to be smart about data written onto it, of which there is a dozen in the world. But those are sparse disk images which 1) existed for a damn decade, 2) are easy to create and test even in VMs, by dozen. You can nest the images arbitrarily, so all the cluster-intercourse is doable on any kind of underlying file system, on any kind of device. Which is pretty saying about the quality of quality assurance in the fruit company these days.
I'm not even sure they downsize the QA, but they might be just steadily increase the system's complexity without also increasing the number of eyeballs to keep tabs on it. APFS data corruption? Phew! Telugu text input major fail? Look dude, everyone is busy testing the new emoji! Don't distract us!
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@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
in most corporations QA departments...
are not QA departments at all. They are misnamed (and typically ineffective) QC departments. QA is often completely non-existent.
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@wft Is your avatar a Messerschmidt?
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@captain no, it’s a sculpture from a small town I visited twice and liked very much.
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As I've said before, Apple has historically only had two states of existence: success as Steve Jobs's private cult of personality, or aimless meandering and dwindling into failure without him at the helm. Now that he's dead, they're stuck in the second one permanently.
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@masonwheeler said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
As I've said before, Apple has historically only had two states of existence: success as Steve Jobs's private cult of personality, or aimless meandering and dwindling into failure without him at the helm. Now that he's dead, they're stuck in the second one permanently.
Stop bragging that you tend to get stuff wrong!
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@masonwheeler The weird thing is they produced BETTER products (IMO) while Steve Jobs was gone. However, I have to admit Apple had utterly failed to move to a more modern OS (their various initiatives all failing miserably) until Steve came back and forced the deal.
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@blakeyrat said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
@masonwheeler The weird thing is they produced BETTER products (IMO) while Steve Jobs was gone.
What products do you have in mind? The many incarnations of the Macintosh?
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@blakeyrat By "modern" you mean "bug-ridden monstrosity implemented in a horrible language"?
Actually... yeah. That fits pretty well. Jobs was ahead of his time.
Filed under: Web apps are very modern
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@kt_ said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
What products do you have in mind? The many incarnations of the Macintosh?
Probably Mac OS 7, which, though I’ve only played around with a bit on an old Mac Plus I have, in retrospect seems a lot better than the Windows 3.x and 95 I was using when Mac OS 7 was current.
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@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
if you're using their shiny new APFS with sparse bundle disk images, you're going to lose data, big time.
Only if you try to write more to the sparsebundle than will fit on the physical disk it’s on, as I recall.
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@gurth Okay, but I'd expect some kind of
ENOSPC, notEFUCKYOURDATAin that case.
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My personal grudges with Apple are in that the more obscure (or rather less talked about) features are capricious and buggy. Well, this sparsebundle stuff can be one example, because who the fuck is using sparsebundles, right? Some obscure geeks and sysadmins, so they will eventually swallow their pride and find a workaround. Their out-of-the-box VPN client is another crock of shit.
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@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
even in VMs
ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND
Don't forget Apple spends exorbitant amount of resources on making their system not run in a VM¹.
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@bulb But any Mac can become a server!
macOS Sonoma
macOS Sonoma brings stunning screen savers, desktop widgets, new ways to share work and web apps along with fun personalization tools and Game mode.
(Granted, the last time they actually released a model of Mac that was made for server use was in 2012. Even earlier if you wanted a "proper" professional-grade server.)
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@atazhaia :inigo_montoya_think_it_means_meme:
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@twelvebaud So they're removing like 80% of the functionality and are suggesting thirdparty alternatives. Oh, well.
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@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
Their out-of-the-box VPN client is another crock of shit.
Yep. Complete and total garbage when compared to the same piece on Windows. I don't even know why they bothered.
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@bulb For mere mortals, they put all kinds of obstacles (you cannot really make an accelerated video driver — even with 2D acceleration only — without signing an NDA which quite probably is signed with blood of all developers involved, and their kidneys and firstborns are harvested for noncompliance). Which doesn't quite prevent me from running El Capitan in a VM to test stuff when I need it. They even don't have the ridiculous license limitation on how many VMs I may run, which Windows has.
But the internal testing is a completely different story, innit?
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@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
@gurth Okay, but I'd expect some kind of
ENOSPC, notEFUCKYOURDATAin that case.That's exactly the problem, from the limited reading I’ve done on this. Due to the way APFS works combined with the way expanding disk images (like sparsebundles) work, signals get crossed somewhere and no
ENOSPCis raised. That results in data possibly being written to a disk image that can’t expand anymore, and that, apparently, to overwriting existing parts of it.@wft said in Apple, WTF is wrong with you?:
this sparsebundle stuff can be one example, because who the fuck is using sparsebundles, right?
Only everybody who uses Time Machine on a network volume, if I’m not mistaken. On a local volume it just writes to the disk, but back up to, say, a Time Capsule or a NAS, it’ll create a sparsebundle to make sure it has a filesystem it can work with.
