On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 DeRobertis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 1:30 AM +0100 on 11/18/99, M. Uli Kusterer wrote:
> >>Enter the wonderful world of temp files :)
> >
> >Anthony,
> >
> > my thought exactly, though there will be problems if we wanted to merge a
> >temp file's contents back into the standie. We might have to live w/o it,
> >that is place a 'data' file next to the application that contains
> >additional blocks. That is, we might need a feature to override blocks in
> >one file with those from another. This shouldn't be much of a problem, but
> >won't look that elegant.
>
> Nope -- not true. Consider [for unix] something along the lines of:
>
>
> check for existing temp file, create temp file [no temp races, please]
> copy stack to temp file
> use temp file
> on quit:
> exec copy-back-stack
> NuCard is now no longer running; copy-back-stack is
> copy back the temp file
> exit
I don't think follow this. I can see this working if you wrap a shell
script around the whole thing, but then if having two files is OK, why
not just have the engine and stack separate? And if "copy-back-stack"
is something the standalone writes out and then executes, you have the
problem of "who deletes that separate file?" And of course the problem
that it would have to be a platform-specific executable.
> >>Which OS's are like this? I know Unices are not, as long as you have write
> >>permission.
> >
> > I'm not sure exactly. Scott mentioned this problem as a reason why MC
> >can't save changes to standalones on Mac; they wanted all versions to
> >behave the same on all platforms. IMO he also counted unix among the
> >platforms that didn't allow this, but I'm not sure.
>
> You can do it on the Mac -- I think Scott's just scared of messing up and
> destroying the executable, crashing the mac, and making the user unhappy.
It's more a matter of just not wanting to write a bunch of code that
would only work on that one platform. The standalone builder is just
a stack in MetaCard (like all the rest of the development
environment), so we don't have C++ code just lying around to handle
this.
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
