Please review first draft of Fossick - a MacPorts GUI

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 20, 2013, at 18:17, Ian Wadham wrote:
> 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.

Yes, the Console says some things; I'm attaching the output.

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It's Xcode 4.6.2 on OS X 10.8.3.


>>> 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?

I couldn't find it. I found instructions for Xcode 4.2 but they didn't seem to apply on 4.6 anymore; what they told me to look for wasn't there.


> 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?

ARC requires the 10.7 SDK or newer, and the deployment target set to 10.6 or newer. You can run an ARC app on Snow Leopard, but you cannot compile it on Snow Leopard because Snow Leopard's version of Xcode doesn't have the 10.7 SDK.

Some information I found online said ARC on 10.6 was further limited in some way, but I couldn't figure out what they meant.