Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
- Subject: Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
- From: Jerry Krinock <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:26:20 -0700
On Apr 9, 2008, at 11:08 PM, Ben Lachman wrote:
On Apr 9, 2008, at 3:27 PM, David Duncan wrote:
Typically you would only use 1 target. Use the SDK to the OS whose
API your are targeting (such as the 10.5 SDK). Then set the
deployment target to the minimum version you wish to run on
(example, 10.3). Finally, you would do runtime checks for API
availability.
That's fine if the classes exist in all the OS versions, but more
commonly you'll want to use complete classes that are not available in
earlier SDK, of which there are many, especially in Leopard. Code
instantiating such classes must be put in separate bundles that are
loaded when the user activates a Tiger/Leopard-only feature that
requires instantiating a Tiger/Leopard-only class. It's another hoop
you have to jump through. Also, when you encounter obscure bugs in
10.3, no one can help you because no one remembers them and no one
cares.
This is totally true. Multiple binaries make unhappy users. Of
course buggy cross-version binaries make unhappy users too.
And unhappy programmers. My estimate is that supporting 10.3-10.5
increases my development + testing + bug-fixing time increases by a
factor of 1.5 over what it would be if it was 10.5 only, plus the
penalty that I simply forego some features which are not practical to
implement or disable in 10.3, and not worth the time to split off into
my "Tiger" bundle.
I recommend that you explain to your requirments guru(s) the high cost
of 10.3-10.5 support and ask them to reconsider if you really need to
do this, Lorenzo.
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