Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out.
Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for
/pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet.[…]
In a post about how macOS’s boot volume structure has been updated, Howard Oakley explains that the
pkgdirectory was added to the Data volume in macOS 26.4, but not added to the root of the Signed System Volume until 27.0. He also notes that this is sort of a big deal.The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, no one seems to know what this new directory is for! It’s odd that Apple would update their filesystem structure, add it to everyone’s PATH, and there not be some explicable reason.
↫ Gavin Anderegg
I guess we’ll find out eventually, but this does highlight something that I find extremely unsettling about this. With proprietary software like macOS, you literally are at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do to “your” operating system. You install an update, and aside from all the documented changes, there’s going to be changes you simply have no idea what they’re for, or why they’re there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s obviously not something nefarious going on in this particular case, but it still feels wild to me that people just willingly accept this.
In the open source world, stuff like this simply does not happen. You’re not going to install a bunch of Fedora updates one day and find a mysterious, undocumented folder in your PATH. Such a change will be documented, but even in the unlikely event it’s not, you can just go through the commit history and find out exactly why the new folder is there, and what its intended purpose is or is going to be.
Considering the state of the world and the people corporations like Apple really answer to, I would not be comfortable with letting them dictate even something as simple as my PATH.
