AS Quality Assurance (was: Re: 9.2.2 Update effects on applescript)
AS Quality Assurance (was: Re: 9.2.2 Update effects on applescript)
- Subject: AS Quality Assurance (was: Re: 9.2.2 Update effects on applescript)
- From: christian vick <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:24:53 +0100
on 11.12.2001 2:38 Uhr, Jolly Roger at email@hidden wrote:
>
I'm personally amazed that this bug wasn't caught in the QA cycle BEFORE the
>
product shipped. Has Apple done away with AppleScript quality assurance?
>
Surely if a QA team had bothered to actually run some scripts in 9.2.2,
>
they'd have come across this problem, no?
I don't think there is a dedicated person for QA. The 9.2.2 problems would
have been noticed, surely (and many other obvious problems in the past). I
don't understand this. It affects thousands of AS developers and even a lot
more users who are using our scripts. In my case at least 5000 users are
affected if they update to 9.2.2. :-(
I can't count the number of hours i spent in the past to adapt scripts to
new AS versions and to workaround bugs in general. This is what really
bothers me with AS!! I could easily be double-effective if AS would be
better tested and bugfixed.
QA Manager for AS would be a dream job, you could easily test new AS builds
with some scripts that involve nearly all of the commands, just looking for
the proper end result of the script. :-))
From what i know of real Mac programming (that's not much :), the OS toolbox
fixes functions by releasing always a new function to _supplement_ the old
function. This ensures that apps which rely on a specific behaviour of a
function are still calling the old version of the function and therefore
just working fine with all newer versions of the OS. That's why even very
old apps usually just work fine in current OS versions.
I wonder if something like this could be implemented for AS.
One way could be to using otionally <statement_version>, so if you write
"entire contents of" it just compiles to the newest version. But if you
explicit provide the version number "entire contents of_101" it uses version
1.0.1 of "entire contents".
Internally, the script would always store with which version numbers the
statements have been compiled, ensuring that it uses always the right
version on newer OS releases. If it's running on an older OS than it has
compiled on, it just uses the newest function version.
I can imaging that this is not easy to implement. Maybe it would work to
store only the version of AS at compile time in a script and later the OS is
running the proper AS environment for that script. This would give the
scripter not a choice of which version of a command he want to use, but it
would help that older scripts stops working on new OS releases.
Greetings
cris