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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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)
