[Openmcl-devel] Re: Deploying apps and MacOS X point upgrades

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

> Gary (and I suppose Randy Beer and Mikel Evins - and anyone else with
> suggestions)
>
> What, if anything can be done about the fact that applications (such as
> the IDE) need to be rebuilt for every point upgrade to MacOS X? This
> makes is somewhat inconvenient for potential users - we don't want to
> have to require that users rebuild an OpenMCL based app every time they
> install a new point upgrade from Software Update.
>
> Just wondering what my/our options are…

I think that there's a good long-term solution here, but it's been in the
"long term" for several months now.  That solution involves not knowing
anything about classes/methods/slots that aren't described in the header
files; that information's much more likely to remain consistent from
release to release, and the lisp wouldn't have any reason to care if
there were very subtle changes deep in the internals between point
releases.

Mikel suggested a possible short-term solution a few days ago (where the
application might rebuild itself if it discovers that it's on a new OS
release (new AppKit/Foundation library versions).  That's obviously a
lot better than just dying, and not necessarily any worse than some
things that people are used to (e.g., the Installer spending several
minutes to "optimize" your system because you've installed a new version
of iPhoto.)

>
> regards,
>
> Ralph
>
> Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
> raffaelcavallaro at mac.com