Tue, 23 Mar 2004

Upgraded to Panther

on Big Mac. What a royal pain - Apple very cheerfully deleted my sendmail configuration, destroyed my imap server and otherwise variously wrecked havoc throughout the system.

A cardinal rule of installer software is "first, delete no files" ... which Apple seems to do a pretty good job of following, most of the time. When they need to replace a file they'll save the old one as ".applesaved". Except for the sendmail configuration files. AND YOU NEVER DELETE A BINARY UNLESS YOU'RE REPLACING IT WITH AN UPDATED VERSION OF THE SAME PROGRAM. Even Microsoft follows this rule.

I wouldn't have minded so much if they replaced sendmail with postfix (in fact, between Kris and I we now have postfix running just fine as our base MTA), but they could've saved the config and the binary just in case I wanted to refer to them in the future - futhermore, I know that they're perfectly capable of doing this, as they managed to save several other little server type programs running on that machine (including an old version of rsync) just fine. And they politely backed up my Apache conf file so restoring my settings was a simple matter of renaming the old to the new.

Maybe I'm just a stickler for details, but the only time we've ever had any problems with the Mac has been when we upgraded the OS. It'll be a warm day in Hel (a little heathen humor there) before Panther gets to my laptop.

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