Nate Abele's Profile

Hi Matthew, I hate to sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but it seems that for as much as you claim responsibility, you seem equally eager to point out where Apple could have improved. You claim that the /usr folder and all other things Unix should be completely transparent to "normal" users, but point out the lack of documentation on it. If, under normal operating conditions, the directory is never visible anyway, why would it be documented? Why would Apple trouble the user with the fact that it even exists? Clearly we can all agree that the problem began when you introduced a 3rd party application into your system. Now, Apple has plenty of safe-guards against keeping users from doing things they shouldn't (i.e. by hiding the /usr directory), but when you're an application developer, there's a general expectation that, generally speaking, you know what you're doing. Now, could Apple put safe-guards in place to prevent applications from tampering with system resources? I suppose, but in any piece of software (indeed, almost anything in life) the level of security has to be weighed against ease of use. Otherwise, you end up with Windows Vista, where you have to click through a dozen dialog boxes to delete a file that *you* downloaded. So, all that being the case, to me it sort of begs the question: what was the main idea of the article? If you're truly taking responsibility, that only leaves a couple of options (that I can see anyway). Either it was a warning to new users of what not to do, or you felt that the viewing public could use a laugh at your expense. Actually, even was a warning, I would tend to doubt the value, since, within the context of this specific situation, there isn't a lot to gain other than "don't delete stuff". The fact is, this is such a minor edge case it's almost not even worth considering. I am a developer, and I've installed all kinds of stuff on my MacBook, and my /usr directory is still hidden. If I didn't know exactly what I was doing, I wouldn't be able to get into it.