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[REBOL] Re: help with mail attachment please

From: holger:rebol at: 15-Aug-2001 12:14

On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 11:48:51AM -0600, David Kachel wrote:
> What we are talking about is NOT a minor feature. If *nix platforms had > no command line, you would implement the needed connections in whatever > way required.
Software development requires people, money, time and other resources, all of which are usually scarce. This means platforms and features have to be prioritized. The market share is one criteria for determining priorities, but not the only one. The amount of effort, the learning curve and the quality of developer documentation are other criteria, and, unfortunately, MacOS has some deficiencies in these areas. MacOS makes it pretty much impossible to do "casual development" with only minor adaptations from Windows or Unix, the way it can be done for BeOS, AmigaOS, Elate, QNX, WinCE etc. Developing a MacOS application that supports all those various MacOS oddities requires a very focused and resource-consuming development effort for that single platform, and at the moment we do not always have those resources. We just spent a lot of time this spring porting View/Pro to MacOS, but there are limits to the amount of resources we can commit exclusively to a single platform. As RT grows we will hopefully be able to concentrate more on MacOS, wireless devices, OS/400, VMS, and some of the other platforms that users frequently request REBOL ports for. These things take time though.
> Macs do things differently. So what! They require a different kind of > implementation, i.e., AppleScript. So what! That is the way it is done on > a Mac. And despite the fact that OS X (*nix based) does have a command > line, it STILL uses apple events and AppleScript. AppleScript will > continue to be the way such things are done on the Mac platform, by all > but the most die-hard.
That is very unlikely. Mac OS X is basically a wrapper around a BSD (Unix) kernel, that tries to emulate as much of the old Mac OS environment as possible. Mac OS X supports as much of the legacy Mac OS API (even Apple calls it "legacy" now) as possible, but internally it is simply yet another Unix, although with a somewhat fancy desktop. All of the MacOS legacy functions and features are layered on top of it and around it, i.e. using those instead of Unix equivalents is possible to some degree, but probably at a performance penalty compared to using direct Unix APIs. As far as the execution model of OS X is concerned, that is standard Unix as well. That's why a normal Unix build of REBOL/Core works just fine on Mac OS X (with multiple instances, command lines and everything else), just like the majority of other stdio-based Unix software. REBOL/View would work as well if OS X supported X11. Without it we would have to go through Apple's new OO API (Aqua etc.), which we would be happy to do if Apple could finally get around to providing just a little bit of developer documentation. Last time I checked the web site still listed pretty much every single function and concept with the comment "documentation forthcoming"...
> Your complaint that you haven't made Rebol 'the same' on the Mac because > 'the Mac is different' is at best weak and certainly leaves Rebol's > "cross-platform" and "universal" claims ringing quite hollow indeed.
My comment was not meant as a complaint, simply as a description of the facts. cross-platform does not mean that every single feature is immediately available, in all versions of REBOL, and on all platforms. Some things simply take time, and some features won't be available on some platforms at all. -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]