That is a very interesting if not a prodigiously strained hand-wave of a solution to GGP's complaint, "that the OS has no way to keep apps up to date," as Safari, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Messages, FaceTime, Notes, Preview, TextEdit, KeyNote, Pages, Numbers, GarageBand, Quicktime Player, Activity Monitor, Terminal, Console, Disk Utility, and hundreds of other bundled applications, and including the tens of thousands of BSD userland utilities, as well as the AppStore itself, are packages managed by the package manager called Software Update, a Preference Panel in System Preferences, which is the GUI front end for /usr/bin/softwareupdate.
There is no package manager that exists on any platform that manages every application there is, but between softwareupdate, AppStore, and the only professional and stable third party package manager for macOS that exists, MacPorts —these three package managers can be employed to keep well over 2 million distinct installed packages up to date.
You're calling my comment strained, but somehow missed the fact that all of the things you mentioned are shipped by Apple and updated basically together? The comment mentions Sparkle as "patching up this gap" so it's very clear what they meant: third party applications. Nobody is asking for updates for "every application there is", but providing an API to update third-party apps. MacPorts, despite getting significant investment in the past from Apple, is now definitely a third-party solution and not an system API.
> You're calling my comment strained, but somehow missed the fact that all of the things you mentioned are shipped by Apple and updated basically together?
Again, you're handwaving and intentionally failing to acknowledge that Safari and GarageBand and all the other applications are applications, like any other a team may develop and/or a user may use source to build, or download and run an installer, or drag and drop a bundle, far more complex than, technically speaking, most available applications, and very big programs to the non-technical. Yet in regards to the operating system, not in the remotest way, "and related content."
Safari is not and Music and Photos are not related to the OS. They have nothing to do with the kernel, nothing to do with core services, nothing to do with directory services or App Kit, they're just applications. Apple bundles applications, and this is entirely irrelevant to the operating system "and related content." The bundled applications have nothing to do with the OS, which will keep chugging along whether they're there or not.
The salient detail here that has been lost on you since my initial comment is that softwareupdate manages a metric sh!tton of packages and keeps them updated with very little effort from the operator, like any good package management system should, and not merely "updates the OS and related content," an astounding simplification that misses the fact that it is a package manager, just like FreeBSD ports, just like pkgsrc, just like yum, just like RPM, aptitude, Ubuntu Software Center, Windows Package Manager, and just like MacPorts, AppStore, and Cydia, and hundreds if not thousands of other available package management systems.[1]
softwareupdate isn't just some cute Apple product, and Apple certainly didn't invent or pioneer package management; softwareupdate manages thousands if not tens of thousands of packages that have absolutely nothing to do with a computer operating system. It isn't called "macOS Update," it is called softwateupdate for patently obvious reasons.
> MacPorts, ... is now definitely a third-party solution
I could have sworn I stipulated it was third party. Didn't I?
Your commenting style reminded me a lot of a discussion I had earlier, which went on far longer than I had expected it to for stupid semantic quibbles that didn't even end up panning out to be correct. Of course I decided to go look it up, and it's none other than you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589999
Here is some unsolicited feedback: you are unpleasant to interact with. You reply to people in an incredibly smug and self-satisfied way, except you often say things that are wrong or at the very least significantly misunderstand context. When people mention this to you just dig deeper by doubling down and accusing people of intentional bad faith. To be honest your responses make me wonder if you are involved in distribution of macOS software, because your views seem to distanced from the request at the top of this thread, which is so familiar to every Mac developer that they would recognize it immediately, and yet your initial response was like you just went online and searched "macOS update software" and picked the first command line tool you found, without looking at whether it matched the need being expressed. When I told you this you seem to have fixed on the word "package manager" and decided to argue that softwareupdate is one rather than understanding that I literally do not care what you call it. I understand and accept that macOS's built in software updater can update some of the things you've mentioned, although I disagree on the details of how you've presented it, but you haven't for a moment stopped to think "why did Sparkle come up in the conversation at all? Perhaps I am missing something by not addressing it?" Instead you ended up focusing some sort of definition about how OS updates and security patches are some sort of "package manager", and decided to be condescending while you did so. Seriously, you don't get to call my point for a "system API" to be a strawman when it is responding to a need for a "core OS service".
I enjoy talking to people who know their stuff, and sometimes I will put up with jerks if I learn something new, even though I would rather that they weren't abrasive. I haven't learned anything from this conversation, and I am unsure you know what you're talking about let alone what we are talking about. The fact that you keep doing this is quite disappointing and honestly makes me not want to engage with you. I don't check usernames very often and might still do it by accident but if you keep this up and I suddenly stop responding to you it's probably because I realized who I was talking to and didn't want to respond anymore.
/usr/bin/softwareupdate [1]
[1] https://ss64.com/osx/softwareupdate.html