OSX is great. I get the best GUI readily available on top of BSD. With a few issues (I'm looking at you, mod_fastcgi!), everything compiles just fine. And, the coolest part is that I can do webapp demos right on my MacBook cause Firefox, Apache, and MySQL all run just fine. And, judging from what people are using at YAPC, a lot of Perlers seem to agree with me.

But, there's one major issue that plagues the *nix developer - the stupid case-insensitive filesystem. Oh, it displays everything correctly; it is case-preserving. But, Foo.txt and foo.txt just won't co-exist. There is hope, though. Starting in 10.3 (Jaguar), OSX did release a case-sensitive version of HFS+. It's not enabled by default, and for good reason - lots of OSX applications will keel over or do "Bad Things"(tm) in a case-sensitive environment. Whether or not you win the moral victory cause the developers were stupid, the app still doesn't work.

So, the solution would appear to partition the hard-drive into a bootable case-insensitive partition and have a case-sensitive one for development work. Which is what I did today and I'm here to say that it works pretty good. I use SuperDuper to make a bootable backup on an external HD and booted off of it. That allowed me to partition my main disk. I then restored the backup, booted from the main disk, and put SVK and my personal build of Perl over there. A dev@->/Volumes/Dev in my homedir and we're ready to go.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to (OT) Fixing OSX's biggest weakness as a dev platform by dragonchild

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