That was my first thought as well. And then I started wondering why they are automating so much setup on OS X itself instead of using something like Vagrant for dev stuff.

I find OS X to be pretty frustrating to work with natively. I've long tried to keep things like Postgres and Python consistent, but even a 10.x.y update can break things. Even with homebrew and postgresapp, it's challenging to keep the system from breaking. I'm currently running 10.7 precisely because I didn't want to rebuild my setup on 10.8 (I've since started using Vagrant much more aggressively to help solve this).

I realize that part of the point of boxen is to help set a baseline but it seems like a Vagrant box that mimics the actual Github stack would make more sense.

This surprised me too, I would not have expected that Githubbers develop on OS X and deploy to Linux.

I would be interested to hear more about why they made that choice.

Not everything we work on deploys to Linux.

Understood, but the original blog post begins “Boxen started nearly a year ago as a project called “The Setup” — a pipe dream to let anyone at GitHub run GitHub.com on their development machine with a single command.”

It was this line specifically which implied that Boxen is used to emulate the production environment in OS X and spurred my comment.

Except Vagrant is used to spin up small virtual development environments whereas it looks like this is used to actually spin up a physical machine.

Vagrant spins up the VM but then hands off to a provider (chef, puppet, etc.) for configuration.

Unrelated, but I am excited by pending vmware fushion support: vimeo.com/58059557

Looks more like Pivotal Workstation: https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation