[Macpartners] Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Update

[Albert Willis]

On Jul 12, 2005, at 9:52 AM, Stephen Dowdy wrote:

> I’m sure Jerry Grochow would love to have his budget increased so  
> that he could provide more services and you wouldn’t have to wait  
> over 2 months to get full support of Tiger.  Perhaps you should  
> take your argument to Apple for releasing a OS upgrade that breaks  
> so many applications.  No one would hesitate to bash Microsoft if  
> they released an new OS that causes so many problems.
Just to shed some light on the situation, most of the problems that  
are attributed to Tiger are really 3rd-party software vendors that  
have had developer releases of Tiger since July 2004 and did not have  
updated products when Tiger shipped on April 29, 2005. Yes, Tiger had  
a number of problems when it shipped, which it to be expected when a  
new operating system ships. In the nearly twelve years I've worked  
here, I have yet to see a bug-free release of an operating system.  
Compared to some previous operating system releases and technology  
transitions (NT to Windows 2000, Mac OS X 10.0, Windows 95/98/ME come  
to mind), this one isn't so bad. However, high profile applications  
such as SAPgui are affected, so it seems worse than it really is and  
that it's happened during end of the fiscal year buying and desktop  
renewal.

It's also problematic that developers don't follow Apple's  
guidelines. For example, Apple has said in the past to not to use  
kernel extensions unless you really really need to, since they could  
break when the kernel changes, which it does with every operating  
system update (like going from 10.4.1 to 10.4.2). The other reason to  
not to create kernel extensions is, because they live in kernel  
space, they can crash the entire system if they misbehave. Of course,  
McAfee and Cisco used kernel extensions for Virex and the VPN client  
and that's the main reason why they  didn't work under Tiger,  
although they had ample opportunity to discover that prior to Tiger's  
release. Of course a pre-release operating system is a moving target  
as well; however, Tiger went golden master about 2-3 weeks prior to  
it's release, so something could have been done.

Part of the issue is that Apple is pushing the envelope--this is the  
fifth major release of Mac OS X in 4 years. Every major release has  
many new features and under-the-hood changes. Actually, Apple has  
slowed down somewhat--they were shipping a new release every 12  
months; the schedule is now every 18 months. They've already  
mentioned that Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will be released at around the  
same time as Longhorn--late 2006 or early 2007. Being on this  
schedule makes it tough on some developers to keep up.

The reason that IS&T invests the time and effort into testing is  
because we've learned that companies sometimes ship programs that  
contain bugs and cause problems and would increase the burden on our  
support resources. We often have to wait for an updated version of an  
application before we can safely release it. For example, we've been  
waiting for a version of Virex that we felt comfortable releasing  
since last summer.

Finally, IS&T probably needs to develop a process that addresses the  
different types of users on campus. Self-supporting early adopters  
and support providers could have earlier access to a new operating  
system than others than require a higher level of IS&T support. I'm  
hopeful that's something we will investigate implementing at some point.

We have more testing to do, but we may be able to give an update on  
the status of Mac OS X 10.4.2 and related issues next week.

   -- Al


______________________________
Albert Willis
Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
awillis at mit.edu

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