A growl about Growl (and NSAlert?)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 7, 2013, at 23:26, Ian Wadham wrote:

> I have been trying to get Pallet (MacPorts GUI) working in my environment:
> OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) and Xcode 4.6, but it is badly broken.  One large problem
> is that there is no feedback re whether a request has succeeded or failed or
> what went wrong if it failed.
> 
> I think this is because Growl @1.1.6 is not installed (although it is not listed
> as a dependency of Pallet).  The Pallet code is certainly referencing its Growl
> interface and providing text strings, whenever a MacPorts action finishes.
> But nothing happens.
> 
> I tried to install Growl @1.1.6, but the installation failed.  See attached log.
> 
> Browsing around the Growl website, it appears Growl has moved on quite
> a lot since v1.1.6 and is now v2.0.1, for Lion and Mountain Lion, for $4.99
> in the App Store.  It has been chargeable since Growl 1.3.  See:
> 
>    http://growl.info/downloads --- and the apalogia on:
>    http://growl.posterous.com/growl-13-a-summary-of-the-major-changes
> 
> It is claimed to be Open Source, but it is not free (as in beer).
> 
> I tried to find out if any other MacPorts ports use Growl, but could not.
> The "port dependents" command only applies only to installed ports.
> 
> The question is whether I should persist with Growl?  Maybe whether MacPorts
> should persist with Growl or just discontinue its very old version?
> 
> Should I switch to Cocoa's NSAlert, which apparently is OS X's version
> of a popup message box?  Growl has some additional nice features, like
> being able to look back over history.  NSAlert seems rather basic, but I
> can certainly use it to continue testing and finding out how much Pallet
> actually does for the end-user.

Users should not be required to use Growl; Growl should be optional. Users who want Growl features can install Growl; those who don't won't be bothered.

I have Growl 1.2.2 installed on Mountain Lion (manually, outside of MacPorts); works great for me (for purposes unrelated to Pallet). I like it when software supports Growl.

Note that Pallet includes its own copy of the Growl framework. We have a ticket about that being a bad idea, and wanting it to use a central copy of the Growl framework: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/27180#comment:13

Growl having switched from free open source to paid has put a kink in MacPorts' plans. Not sure how we should handle the Growl port going forward. We would at least like to update it to the latest free version: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/22684

The error you showed in your log building growl 1.1.6 is well-known; see https://trac.macports.org/ticket/32911