Please review first draft of Fossick - a MacPorts GUI

[Ian Wadham]

On 21/04/2013, at 9:43 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On Apr 20, 2013, at 18:17, Ian Wadham wrote:
>> On 21/04/2013, at 7:33 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> <fossick.txt.bz2>
> 
> It's Xcode 4.6.2 on OS X 10.8.3.

Thanks, Ryan.  That's very strange.  Everything worked OK, except for a couple of
(OS X 10.8?) grumbles I don't see on Lion.  Fossick gets its list of ports (ATM) from
the MacPorts Index file, but finds no ports on your system.  It also runs commands
"installed", "requested" and "outdated" internally, to get statuses, and it finds some ports …

Fossick is looking for the "port" command in /opt/local/bin and the Index file in
/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/ports/PortIndex.

Do you perchance have your MacPorts Index file in a different place?  Is there
a smarter way to locate that file?  I hate using literals in programs.

>> 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.

Thanks again, Ryan.  I'm a newbie with this Apple stuff … even an expert finds it hard … :-)
Hopefully the documentaion will become more complete in time.

Cheers, Ian W.