Please review first draft of Fossick - a MacPorts GUI

[Ian Wadham]

On 21/04/2013, at 7:33 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Apr 20, 2013, at 03:54, Ian Wadham wrote:
> 
>>  b. The GUI - how it works, ease of use, etc.
> 
> All three panes are empty; I can't figure out how to make it do anything.

I am sorry to hear that.

It probably means it has crashed somehow during launch.  Does the Console
app say anything useful?  What Xcode and OS X versions did you use?  Fossick
should start by listing all the ports, starting at 2Pong, and then become responsive.

>>  d. Backwards compatibilty - in theory Xcode 4.6 can build for earlier versions of
>>      OS X than 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion, but I have no idea how that works
>>      out in practice and documentation seems to be vague to non-existent.
> 
> I wouldn't bother with more backward compatibility than that. If I were writing a Mac app today, I would want to use automatic reference counting, which works somewhat on Snow Leopard and fully on Lion and later. I don't know Xcode 4.6 well enough to be able to determine if you're using ARC in Fossick or not but I assume you are.

I think I *am* using ARC, but apparently you can only select it when you first create
the project.  That was several weeks ago and I don't remember.  I have searched
high and low for some "status" indicator, even grepped the project files, but found
nothing.

Does anyone know how to find out if an established project uses ARC?

Re backwards compatibility of ARC (automatic reference counting), a method of
dynamic memory management, I get the impression it is implemented by the
compiler automatically generating the required memory management code, so
maybe it will be possible to build ARC with Xcode 4.6 and target an earlier
version of OS X.  Who knows?

Cheers, Ian W.