Re: XCode Link Error - What does this mean?
Re: XCode Link Error - What does this mean?
- Subject: Re: XCode Link Error - What does this mean?
- From: Rick Sustek <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 17:30:58 -0700
Jason, Marshall,
I certainly see your perspective on what you think the ideal behavior
should be. And in another world, that would be great.
But in *this* world, that perspective may be misinformed.
You can certainly claim that Xcode, being an Apple developed Mac app,
should do all the right magic to morph wistful file names and paths,
into a format that is digestible to the underlying GNU tools. That
might be achievable. But it misses the point.
Step away from Xcode for a moment. The entire Mac OS X system is
built over a UNIX pedigreed system. Apple has done a wonderful job of
shielding the average user from that fact. They have managed to
leverage UNIX, GNU, and many other open source pieces into a very
usable system to the masses. That "lever" is actually a massively
huge and solid mass of power and maturity, which has steadily been
built over the past few decades.
The point being, that there is much, much more UNIX stuff and command
line stuff going on in your Mac system, than lowly Xcode's GUI shim
over GNU tools. Once you claim you are a developer, or a power user,
you have just crossed the magic facade that Apple has put up, and
entered into that realm. Do you have to be some UNIX geek power guru
just to utilize Xcode? Nope, but at least a little knowledge of what
is going on under the hood can often come in handy.
(It was in fact a command line that the original poster pasted into
his question. And it is only by seeing that command that we can see
the problem. Is this ideal? Not really.)
There is a large community of folks that are actively porting open
source projects to the Mac, and not using Xcode projects at all to do
so. Check out the "fink" and "macports" communities. There are nearly
800 command line executable programs in the /usr/bin directory on my
machine, most of which can perform some task that can help me get
work done. Leveraging these resources does require at least some
rudimentary agility with command line execution.
So, Xcode is really just a shim that tries to shield the average
developer from a huge otherworld, and it occasionally has a few
"cracks" in it, through which glimpses can be seen. If a large
majority of developers can become productive faster by using Xcode,
than by using the more traditional UNIXie workflows, then Apple has
done a good job.
But again, the world is bigger than Xcode/GNU, and Apple could never
possibly put a happy GUI face over every command line utility, or
open source app. It is quite beneficial to be able to get around in
both command line, and GUI realms, and know when to use which tool
for the job. A great example is Apple's "Spotlight" technology, and
searching for files in Finder, versus the use of the 'find' command
combined with other commands: as nice as Spotlight is, I can still do
certain types of searches much better using 'find', but there are
also certain types of data retrieval for which Spotlight is more
effective.
Happy coding,
-Rick
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