

JWZ's App Codesign Maze - J3L2404
http://jwz.livejournal.com/1227857.html

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tptacek
What's newsworthy about this? I'm one vote among thousands but as much as I
enjoy reading JWZ, I don't want every one of his blog posts on the front page
of HN.

~~~
J3L2404
A lot of his posts are downright goofy, but this one I can personally relate
to, as can anyone who has navigated the Byzantine labyrinth of Apple's
codesign process. It is time not spent coding and is a drain on developers.

~~~
larsberg
I can relate as well.

Though, everything works fine if you follow the mind-numbing labyrinth of
steps (with pictures!) on their website. It's just as soon as you think the
tool chain will be reasonably smart or tolerant of doing things out of order
that you screw yourself. And, once your machine or project are in a "bad
state," good luck to you.

Just because there are shiny chrome elements on the windows doesn't mean it's
any more tolerant than an m4 autoheader/autoconf/configure chain :-)

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tvon
Not to sound insensitive, but who cares about JWZ's code signing problems?

~~~
kordless
Chances are that you are running some of his code right now, so I think he
deserves a bit of respect. Besides, he's an interesting read because he
doesn't pull punches when discussing issues with software.

That he's having issues getting the build environment working is interesting
from the perspective that Apple pretty much requires you to build your code
using their tools. Imagine if your kid was trying to do it. Imagine if you had
as much trouble trying to get Basic to work back in the day.

~~~
sjs
It's well known that the code signing & cert setup process is troublesome.
Apple has a 70+ page PDF of instructions on the matter. That JWZ is having
trouble is not really surprising as the error messages are not helpful unless
you've built the system, or know it very well.

The problem is that nobody cares about the code signing process itself, we
just want to write apps, so we just read enough on code signing to get things
working. That's what I've seen and experienced anyway.

(I'm heavily generalizing and obviously there will be exceptions where people
have learned about code signing in depth)

