On Jun 10, 2006, at 2:35 PM, Laurence Harris wrote:
On Jun 10, 2006, at 4:08 PM, John Stiles wrote:
I believe gestalt selector would be better for carbonland.
rdar://4581510
Hmm, it seems a bit late to ask for changes. Unless there are
developers which plan on shipping PowerPC-only apps that require
10.5 and up (and need to detect that they are on Intel)? That seems
like a small market to me :)
I agree that Gestalt would have been cleaner, but I kind of think
that ship has already sailed...
It's never too late to ask. ;-) In any case, Apple still sells
PowerPC models. Even though I expect everything will be Intel by the
time 10.5 ships, that's not at all the same as saying everyone will
be using an Intel-based Macs right away, so a lot of developers will
probably be supporting both processors for a while to come.
Transitioning the hardware base is going to take even longer than
transitioning the OS, and look how long it took Mac OS X to really
overtake Mac OS 9.
This is a simple thing to implement, so there might be hope.
In this particular case, changing the value of an existing Gestalt
selector would break binary compatibility with existing applications.
While having a new Rosetta-specific Gestalt selector might be useful,
that requires explicit adoption in the same way as the sysctl does and
it doesn't add much value over the sysctl. Which isn't to say that it
won't happen -- it isn't my decision -- but I think it's unlikely.
