ORIGINS.md

Origins

lib.sh intially emerged as sanity - preserving kit, aimed to make the unforgiving, barely recoverable experience of Apple RecoveryOS - less punishing.

Later on it became the author's daily driver.

Hurt

The Following paragraph is generously sponsored by Trent:

Recovery has been always half-baked environment. Apple hardly could care less, however, and let it rot in every aspect but related to Platform Security.

More, when it comes to improving Platform Security across the products, Apple assumes a user must pay for it with damn degrade in their experience. Well, because they always pay no matter what.

Take Sonoma: why the hell manipulating ~/Library/Containers is so slow, even under root?

And even more interesting: why does

mv ~/Library/C{ontainers,}
do_hacky_stuff
mv ~/Library/C{,ontainers}

make hucky_stuff FAST AGAIN as it had been with pre-Sonoma releases?

Apple, do you count on a poor malicious actor suddenly having succumbed to Comprehending the Essense of the Slowness?

Hope not found

Again, Sonoma:

bash: rsync: command not found

bash-3.2 #

That's due to rsync now suddenly living at /Volumes/Macintosh HD/usr/libexec/rsync/rsync.samba. Nothing to worry about though as this is exactly how caring even less looks like. In the end, consistency is half of the success!

"All is going according to the plan" (C)

Deliberate assault

Sometimes, however, it gets worse on purpose which makes me imagine that Apple rockstar 10x engineers are pushed to their limits in terms of building Security via Emasculation.

Figurally speaking, penile shaft of gpt utility bundled with RecoveryOS, was left without its satellites if say so, for good or not:

bash-3.2 # gpt add
gpt: add: operation not permitted: add

This is:

if (true) { fuck_you(); }

that was planted to gpt.c to sit like a stuck fishbone in the throat, in order for thou, user, to know your place!

Annoying? Of course! But only a little bit: it takes up next to no time to download gdisk which is allowed to make GPT modifications:

bash-3.2 # curl -LO https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/files/gdisk-1.0.10.pkg
   % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   408    0   408    0     0    955      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--   955
100   649    0   649    0     0    545      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--   545
100   387  100   387    0     0    199      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:--   675
100  472k  100  472k    0     0   194k      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:-- 2954k

bash-3.2 # pkgutil --expand-all gdisk-* gdisk

and ./gdisk/Payload/usr/local/bin/gdisk is now your Jedi GPT force!

Loks like the art of eunuchizing fails to deliver.

---

But what I can't underestimate Apple for, is how they disable the fuck out of User Input

That Failed to create activation request screen which can be done nothing about (most of times), even appeals to somewhat masochistic statisfaction.

Somtimes. (if you made a backup)

tmp1

Finishing it with absolutely hilarious stuff:

some Monterey release once had forbidden creating a user named tmp in Setup Assistant.

In a couple of incremental updates THIS CHANGE WAS REVERTED

The reader is encouraged to open an issue, speculating about what was taking place at Apple between the mentioned releases! Only the wrong stories!