[txmt-dev] Re: building textmate on 10.6.8 ... only have clang 1.7/3.0 installed

Adam Strzelecki ono at java.pl
Mon Sep 3 20:24:01 UTC 2012


> I’m impressed by your stubbornness :)

Thank you. I still have 10.6 here on my laptop I took with me on vacation. So I wanted to try out the new changes in TM2. I was also eager to try whether libc++/C++11 or ARC can be easily backported. Just for sake of some apps of mine that still have to run on older OSXes.

> I’m OK with this but we need a way to figure out how to deal with the build number and/or tag the version string.

Well, I was rather about to write "This version is NOT supported, please DO NOT post bug reports, ask for upgrades neither here nor on TxMt lists. I may or may not continue this backport effort, depending it is technically & economically feasible."

Probably once I get back home I will make 2nd attempt to install SL 10.6 under Parallels on my main iMac dev machine and upgrade this laptop to 10.8 too :> It is just a pity Apple hasn't removed limitation for installing 10.6 as VM from their EULA, which really make hard to try/test your software on older OSXes.

> If we do this, I can have 10.6 users auto-update to your builds, there still is a few still using r9147 on 10.6.

Hmm, what about disabling auto-updates at all instead for this backport :) ?

> (…) Build number is (sort of) only relevant for software update checks and crash reporting (matching crashes to the correct version).

As above. I think supporting this is IMHO waste of your time, that can be spent on developing other useful features.

> I assume constraint-based layout will also pose a problem. This is something I am particularly keen on switching to since it will solve the localization issues (only one base nib with per-language replacement strings). There seems to be big demand for Chinese and Japanese translations (and I really hate seeing people translate all the nibs only to have me edit the english versions or introduce new ones).

This will be definitely ultimate obstacle. AFAIK there's no way to support constraint based (auto) layout on 10.6.

Still I am bit against translating developer tools into anything other than English. This works fine for some retail products like Office where your UI have same language as the content you are working on. In case of developer tools, the content - programming languages - are all English, so what's the purpose of having UI expressed in non-English language.

Moreover I don't see how one can maintain all bundle menu, alerts, output translations to make single language translation complete (ever). This would be simply a nightmare!? Then come bug reports from users running TM in different language that someone clicked "The foreign sentence I don't understand" in the menu and it has shown "The alert I don't understand", etc. etc.

There must be good reason that tools such as Xcode are English only, otherwise Apple would need to probably double their team just to maintain translations.

> So in practice it is still possible to make 10.6 builds using ARC and Objective-C subscript accessors, just need 10.7+ to build these?

That's right, both ARC & subscript methods for NSArray/Dictionary seem to be contained by ARCLite, which is unfortunately available only on 10.7 in form of closed-source static library in /usr/lib.
Unfortunately there's no auto-layout compatibility library.

Cheers,
-- 
Adam Strzelecki



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