...is exactly what broke hundreds of apps under Vista. Personally I agree that a self-altering binary is a silly idea unless you want to very specifically distribute a single-file application. Of course OS makers can encourage better practices by creating incompatibilities with (in the majority of cases) silly ideas, but, for example, where's the scope for altering the contents of a self-extracting archive in Apple's idealism? The OSX could do is prompt a user that the file's contents have changed or pop up a warning icon somewhere.
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Making assumptions about application behaviour...
...is exactly what broke hundreds of apps under Vista. Personally I agree that a self-altering binary is a silly idea unless you want to very specifically distribute a single-file application. Of course OS makers can encourage better practices by creating incompatibilities with (in the majority of cases) silly ideas, but, for example, where's the scope for altering the contents of a self-extracting archive in Apple's idealism? The OSX could do is prompt a user that the file's contents have changed or pop up a warning icon somewhere.