[MacPerl-Porters] Fwd: Re: Carbon MPW status

Hi,

the following might be of general interest (unless you already know). Run, don't walk, to your nearest Macintosh an get a copy of MPW :-). Viva MPW.

Best regards,

--Thomas


--- forwarded message begins ---

Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 21:11:20 -0700
To: [email protected]
From: Greg Branche <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Carbon MPW status

At 16:36 -0400 10/4/01, Thomas Myers wrote:
>Hate to bring this up again, but we have been patient about this and have given time for the Powers to be to figure out what the status of this will be. When this was first brought up, there was lots of support and we were told to hold on while decisions were being made. (WWDC statement was something like "We have heard your needs and will get back to you")
>
>The more I use terminal in my Mac OSX usage, the more I miss having MPW. MPW is a much more elegant and extensible solution to terminals usage.
>
>Which brings me to the reason I am asking for status now.
>
>We are actively moving many projects over to Mac OS X and management is planning on staying using MPW's Projector as it will take too long to move over all the databases to something else.
>
>So we are running MPW in classic with is a pain, but workable for the most part. However we are now seeing more of our scripts breaking now that 10.1 has come out.
>
>So I would once again like to hear the current status of getting a carbon MPW.
>

(Personal statement follows. Don't confuse this with any kind of official Apple Computer, Inc. press release or anything.)

I agree that your patience has been above and beyond what should be considered reasonable. I thank you for that. I realize that you folks have businesses to run, and projects to plan for, and you haven't been given the information to make informed decisions concerning your future development directions. I've been waiting for some official response from the company, but I have little faith that it's ever going to happen. I've been forced to remain silent for far too long. Hopefully, I can correct that now.

The current status is that a version of MPW that runs as a native Mac OS X application will never be released outside of Apple, if Apple has any say in the matter. Nor will there be any additional, official, updates to the existing environment.

I used Apple's bug tracking system to track all of the requests from internal and external developers concerning having MPW running natively on Mac OS X. DTS started it after last year's WWDC, and there were over 250 email messages archived in the bug at the end. (It takes about 30 seconds just to open the bug, due to the amount of data that has to be shoved through the wires.) The bug was finally closed by upper level management in August as "Not to be fixed".

Executive Management has stated that there are no plans to move MPW to Mac OS X, nor will there be. The Mac OS X tools are Project Builder and gcc, and that it's time for EVERYONE to get 100% behind them.

Effective 9/10/2001, there is no longer an MPW team. I was redeployed to CarbonLib, and my co-worker interviewed with the AppleScript team, into which she was subsequently hired. (There were only the two of us for the last year or so.) I'll continue to tinker on my own time, but there may be no delivery mechanism for anything I produce. I was able to wrap up the final public release of the shell, 3.6d8, and get it up on the ftp server this week, on my own time over the last month. I've been told that there will be no more changes allowed to the MPW web site, and I don't know how much longer it will even continue to exist. So, you won't see the usual release notice there.

This situation is unlikely to change, unless there's a dramatic change within Apple that I am unable to foresee. I did what I could, within the limits of my position within the company, and without taking too many risks to the continuation of that position. You fine people deserve to know what the current state of the MPW world is, though, so I can no longer stay silent. I'm sorry I couldn't have done more, and don't know how much longer I'll be able to continue working with the environment sources. Maybe management will allow the ftp site to continue to exist. Maybe I'll be asked to move to a position outside the firewall. <shrug>

>Specifically the "mountvolume ipaddress:volume" no longer works under 10.1.
>
>If not, anyone have an idea of how to make mountvolume work again.

I'm not having a problem with this from MPW (3.6d8) using MountVolume (1.0) in Classic (9.2.1) on Mac OS X (10.1). I've been told that the AppleScript MountVolume stuff stopped working as of 10.1 also, so I'd have to assume there's a problem in the system itself. If you have constant problems with this, it may be possible to write an AppleScript, or just compile and run directly from MPW with the RunApplescript and/or new OSAScript commands, and have the Finder perform the volume mounting.

A word of caution though. (Here's another tidbit that y'all need to be aware of that hasn't been publicized at all.) If you're mounting said server to perform Projector operations on a database stored on that server volume, be very cautious. There is a known problem in the Carbon layer (which is used by Classic) in dealing with network entities. The Carbon layer caches certain information from the server file system, and doesn't necessarily update that cached information properly. I've seen instances of ProjectorDB corruption caused by multiple engineers performing a CheckIn operation to the same ProjectorDB stored on a server volume over a period of time. Since each individual workstation caches information on its own, that information (such as file EOF, extents info, etc.) on a different system may be stale (and may be so for up to 30 seconds, from what I gather). I suggest that Projector operations only be accomplished from a machine that is NOT running Mac OS X at the ti!
me.

-----

In summary: Game over, man. Thanks for the support and encouragement over the years, and thanks for reporting the bugs that kept me employed and working on the best development environment I've ever had the opportunity to use. I think you know by now that I'd happily keep maintaining and enhancing MPW for the remainder of my career, to the benefit of us all. And, until my access to the sources is restricted somehow, I will continue to do what I can, and treat this as my own little open-source project (open to me, that is :-). I will also continue to contribute to this community as much as I can. Just keep in mind that it's now a part-time gig.
--

Greg

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