i've mentioned before that i don't like steve jobs' presentations. his
so-called "reality distortion field" is, to me, a "braggart embarrassment
field." but i watched every second of the keynote where he unveiled the
fact
that apple was moving to intel cpus, because hey, historic event in
personal
computing.
for a moment, let's imagine jobs' keynote was one of the grimm's fairy
tales.
he brought that guy from wolfram onstage to show how SEWPER-EEZY-PEEZY it
is
to convert your project to a universal binary. the sheet drops down, you
tick
the "intel" box, you recompile! simple! so that guy plays the role of
The
Compiler Fairy. he enters the scene and recites a little poem!
biddle-eee-bomp-bay,
biddle-eee-bomp-do.
here's a universal binary for you!
having spent well over a week converting my own projects to universal
binaries, i am now able to more properly characterize his performance.
LIES.
ALL LIES. BIG, DIRTY, FILTHY LIES.
the only way you're getting the "tick the box and recompile" experience is
if
your code doesn't need one single tiny change to deal with the new
platform,
and if you're willing to FORCE your ppc users to upgrade to macosx 10.4.
if
you want ppc users to be able to run your program on an older version of
macosx, then you're going to have to do some digging, like i did. there's
no
check boxes to specify what you want, you have to type in 12 strings that
you
find after a gory google search. in my case, i typed two of them wrong.
the
compile didn't fail or produce any error messages, it just didn't target
the
proper version of macosx/ppc i asked for. boy, was *that* ever fun to
debug.
and i still haven't gotten my static libraries building right yet. there
doesn't seem to be any consensus as to how you go about this, because the
topic is still very new. and this is all on top of the several days i had
to
spend fixing up my code, because gcc 4.0 is more strict, and apple has
decided
to deprecate a bunch of methods i was using without providing
replacements.
oh, and. the behavior of the time-keeping methods has changed AGAIN.
here's
the progression, as best as i remember it. mktime() in macosx 10.1 and
earlier did not take DST into account. this was fixed in macosx 10.2.
and
now it's broken again in macosx 10.4. apparently different people have
different ideas about how this stuff should work, since it keeps changing
back
and forth.
oh well, i guess i can't complain too much. i am writing this post with a
version of pnews that is built as a universal binary, i just have some
details
to work out. and the registrations are still trickling in. it's nice to
have
users. perhaps i'll get some points for being one of the first macosx
newsreaders to have an intel-native version.
--
A free market interprets monopoly as damage and routes around it.
-- Paul Graham
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