Mr. Macintosh (tweet):
This article will go over how to restore BridgeOS on your T2 Mac. This is not something that you will ever normally have to do. Restoring or reinstalling BridgeOS would only be needed in the following situations.
- 1. Failed macOS Upgrade
- 2. Failed macOS Combo or Delta Update
- 3. Failed macOS Security Update
- 4. Failed macOS Reinstall
- 5. Command Option R fails to boot your T2 Mac to the current version of macOS Recovery. (10.14 is out but the Mac boots to 10.13)
[…]
I tested the BridgeOS restore on multiple Macs for this article. One of my test devices failed in fantastic fashion. What I thought happened was the BridgeOS update just failed on a fluke. What really happened was Apple Configurator 2 attempted to downgrade BridgeOS from Catalina’s version down to the Production version of Mojave. When Apple Configurator 2 attempted to downgrade on the 3rd step it failed leaving the Mac in a Unusable state. Apple straight up does not allow downgrading BridgeOS. I still have my Air that does not boot.
So if you can’t downgrade, and Apple Configurator won’t let you restore the current (beta) version, I guess you’re just out of luck if you need to do this after installing a macOS beta.
See also: Howard Oakley.
Previously:
Apple Configurator Apple T2 BridgeOS macOS 10.14 Mojave macOS 10.15 Catalina macOS Recovery
Ovid (via Hacker News):
By now, many of you have seen the Perl 6 Github issue “Perl” in the name “Perl 6" is confusing and irritating. The issue suggested renaming Perl 6. While some may think that the name of the issue is trolling, or offensive, the actual issue was created by Elizabeth (Liz) Mattijsen, one of the core Perl 6 developers, a long-time Perl 5 developer, and with her spouse, Wendy, has long been an enthusiastic support of Perl 5/6. There is no trolling here. There is a lot of deep thought, careful discussion, and a genuine desire to find a way to bypass some deeply divisive issues in the Perl community.
While the proposed name was “camelia”, Damian Conway made a strong argument in favor of “raku” and it appears the community is leaning towards this name for various reasons.
[…]
The far, far too terse backstory: the Perl 6 community seems to be split
between those who view Perl 6 as a sister language to Perl 5 and those who
view Perl 6 as a successor to Perl 5.
The Perl 5 community, meanwhile, is split between “f*ck yeah” and “f*ck you”.
Previously:
Update (2019-10-22): Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (via Hacker News).
See also: Perl is dying quick (via Hacker News). It’s not going to be “extinct by 2023,” but it does seem to have declining mindshare.
Language Design Perl Programming
Python Software Foundation (Hacker News):
We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can.
[…]
We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015, and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not. So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020.
It’s been a long transition because the initial releases of 3.x were rough, broke a lot of code, and didn’t seem to offer compelling reasons to upgrade. Even if you wanted to upgrade, your code might have dependencies that hadn’t yet. So it kind of followed the path of Perl 6, even though it was a much less ambitious update.
Contrast this with Swift, where there’s a little breakage each year, which people complain about, but most active code (unfortunately not most code posted on the Web) does get updated rather quickly. Granted, Swift had the benefit of a smaller and younger installed base.
If you need to get fixes for Python 2, there’s Tauthon (via Hacker News):
Tauthon is a backwards-compatible fork of the Python 2.7.16 interpreter with new syntax, builtins, and libraries backported from Python 3.x. Python code and C-extensions targeting Python 2.7 or below are expected to run unmodified on Tauthon and produce the same output.
Victor Stinner (via Hacker News):
Python 3.0 was released 10 years ago. It’s time to look back: analyze the migration from Python 2 to Python 3, see the progress we made on the language, list bugs by cannot be fixed in Python 2 because of the backward compatibility, and discuss if it’s time or not to bury Python 2.
Chris Siebenmann:
Let me translate this: filenames, command line arguments, and so on are no longer portable abstractions. They fundamentally mean different things on Unix and on Windows. On Windows, they are ‘Unicode’ (actually UTF-16) and may include characters not representable as single bytes, while on Unix they are and remain bytes and may include any byte value or sequence except 0. These are two incompatible types, especially once people start encoding non-ASCII filenames or command line arguments on Unix and want their programs to understand the decoded forms in Unicode.
[…]
I’ll note that Python 2 is not magically better than Python 3 here. It’s just that Python 2 chose to implicitly prioritize Unix over Windows by deciding that filenames, command line arguments, and so on were bytestrings instead of Unicode strings. I rather suspect that this caused Windows people using Python a certain amount of heartburn; we probably just didn’t hear as much from them for various reasons.
Python Software Foundation (via Hacker News):
“Python’s batteries are leaking,” said Brown. She thinks that some bugs in the standard library will never be fixed. And even when bugs are fixed, PyPI libraries like Twisted cannot assume they run on the latest Python, so they must preserve their bug workarounds forever.
[…]
Brown identified new standard library features that were “too little, too late,” leaving users to depend on backports to use those features in Python 2. For example, socket.sendmsg was added only recently, meaning Twisted must ship its own C extension to use sendmsg in Python 2. Although Python 2 is nearly at its end of life, this only holds for the core developers, according to Brown, and for users, Red Hat and other distributors will keep Python 2 alive “until the goddam end of time.”
[…]
Van Rossum argued instead that if the Twisted team wants the ecosystem to evolve, they should stop supporting older Python versions and force users to upgrade. Brown acknowledged this point, but said half of Twisted users are still on Python 2 and it is difficult to abandon them.
Anthony Shaw (via Hacker News):
One of the features proposed for CPython 3.8 is PEP554, the implementation of sub-interpreters and an API with a new interpreters module in the standard library.
This enables creating multiple interpreters, from Python within a single process. Another change for Python 3.8 is that interpreters will all have individual GILs[…]
Previously:
Concurrency Language Design Programming Python Sunset
