What the heck is /pkg?

Posted by GavinAnderegg 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by CharlesW 3 days ago

> "Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0…"

Part of macOS 26.4, in fact: https://eclecticlight.co/2026/09/19/macos-tahoe-26-4-changed... "The layout of those hasn’t changed in over six years up to and including macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but has altered in 26.4 and Golden Gate, with the addition of a new firmlinked directory pkg."

Apple doesn't do this stuff lightly. A search of WWDC sessions doesn't mention /pkg specifically, but I'd bet it's related to this: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/206/?time=6...

Comment by cormorant 21 hours ago

So if it's about that WWDC content, it would only be for a new type of MDM managed app installation (declarative management). No new first-party Homebrew ;)

Transcript (@ timestamp) for convenience:

> 10:33 > Next, packages. macOS 27 now gives IT administrators the option to remove all the files and directories that are installed by a declarative management package, when the package configuration itself is removed. > 10:48 > This ensures unwanted data and files are not left behind on devices when no longer needed.

Comment by oefrha 3 days ago

> It’s also not clear what the “pmk” in /etc/paths.d/10-pmk-global refers to.

Maybe package management kit, if we go by recent Apple naming conventions.

Comment by JdeBP 1 day ago

How far Apple has come from the OpenSTEP days, when it would have been called /Package (if the guesses at are correct). (-:

Comment by torben-friis 3 days ago

So they might be aiming for their own brew? Or is there some expectation for a different thing altogether?

Comment by ehnto 1 day ago

It is surprising to me that in such a tightly controlled experience, they haven't attempted to displace brew already.

Comment by jmclnx 3 days ago

As a NetBSD user, I would guess it is for use with pkgsrc. That would be great for mac people if my wild guess is correct.

http://pkgsrc.org/

Comment by Tomte 2 days ago

As a new Mac user I could not decide between Macports and Homebrew, and I went with pkgsrc/pkgin. Cannot complain, have had zero reason to revisit that decision ever since.

Comment by duskwuff 3 days ago

Does pkgsrc use the env, etc, inv, and var subdirectories of /pkg seen here?

Comment by jmclnx 3 days ago

These are the directories under /usr/pkg on NetBSD based upon packages I installed. But setup depends upon OS and the person who set it up. I never heard of inv, maybe inv is a mac thing.

     bin   | include | pkgdb.refcount
     dict  | info    | pkgsrc
     etc   | lib     | qt5
     gcc12 | libdata | qt6
     gcc14 | libexec | sbin
     gcc16 | man     | share
     gnu   | pkgdb   | tests

On NetBSD /var used for logs other data. But I suppose someone could configure under 'pkg' if they wanted to,

Comment by duskwuff 2 days ago

Probably not, then. The /pkg hierarchy on macOS doesn't look like that at all - there's no /pkg/bin, only /pkg/env/global/bin, where /pkg/env/global is a symlink to a subdirectory of /pkg/inv/envs.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by Joker_vD 3 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by weaksauce 3 days ago

yeah i'm happy to be on linux fulltime now from macos. you have the ultimate control over your system at the end of the day and can inspect how everything works and change it. toshy made it easier to keep my muscle memory of mac keybindings which i love and it works really well out of the box. there was a month or two before i installed it because i though it would be this big deal that would break things but to my surprise most everything worked well ootb.

Comment by Waterluvian 3 days ago

Linux is such a beautiful thing for many reasons. For those with the will, desire, and means to use it, it’s a great option.

I think from Apple’s perspective it’s the “I don’t think about you at all” meme. The users who have the will, desire, and means to switch to Linux are not their core target audience. It’s a mutually satisfactory breakup.

Comment by pjmlp 2 days ago

Having learnt UNIX before Linux ever took off, I could not care less, it served a purpose to have a cheap UNIX at home while the campus was still on DG/UX and Solaris, personally for me any UNIX/POSIX like system will do the job.

Comment by chuckadams 3 days ago

I swear, the parasocial relationships some people have with Apple ... it's not like they're the first and only Unix vendor to have opinions on the filesystem.

Comment by smohare 3 days ago

I think you need to add another adjective in there to describe this group that feels like their rights are taken away by Apple.

I used Linux as my daily driver for many years. I enjoy deeply tweaking my system. But I switched to macs when life got busier because I didn’t feel particularly keen being forced to tweak my system constantly. I’ve personally not felt constrained by macOS, so maybe I’m not as erudite of a config wizard as I thought or because I let things like nix-darwin and home-manager do the heavy lifting. But that’s more an aesthetic choice than one made to achieve specific functionality. Maybe I do have more patience for configuring at the whims of others, as my nix setup breaks every major release whereas my previous personal dot files manager written in posix shell does not.

Most the people I know that espouse things similar to the parent use Linux not because they were constrained by another OS, but because it appeals to their ideology. They’d rather be on OpenBSD if they could stomach it. That’s fine and good, but should be transparent.

Comment by weaksauce 3 days ago

I grew up on apple computers and switched to windows and pcs for gaming reasons. when the iphone era came i switched back to them for my work computer and daily driver. my ideology soured when they deprecated perfectly good computers and phones from being able to run more recent software due to a few structural issues. Don't have that with linux generally and i don't want to be beholden to some update cycle to appease the apple managers and their sales targets. macos is great and the best software they've made... i just don't like their philosophy no. (that and ever since jobs died it's kinda gone downhill... tahoe is pretty bad it seems)

that said linux is objectively better in the freedom to do what you want department and complete customization areas and kde has a lot of the nice extras i had to install other software for on macos or windows out of the box. (middle mouse click on the magicmouse works out of the box, window management stuff, gaming controllers are some that come to mind)

i also think the people that think linux is some kind of super difficult thing to use forget that windows and macos have a ton of issues too and not everything works... you're just used to how it's broken and how to fix it from decades of using it. for 95% of the people that only use a handful of apps and a browser it's perfectly fine... you just need to call a different IT person to fix it or google it or even just use an LLM if you are so inclined.

Comment by pjmlp 2 days ago

The biggest difference is that usually most PC and Apple stores will handle the Windows or macOS issues, while there are hardly any Linux stores for normies other than some online stores, or for those in enterprise having maintenance support contracts from specific vendors like Lenovo and Dell.