Mike Davis writes:
> All of these questions assume staying with GCC.
>
> 1) How do I verify which OS version is being used? There is no
> version listed in the include files.
In prc-tools, by whether the directory is .../include/PalmOS2/... or
.../include/PalmOS3/... Having asked that question, you should now
expect email from David Fedor saying "what is it that you really want
to know?" :-). And that's very reasonable I think -- MacOS spent years
inventing Gestalt when it became clear that "what OS version is it?"
was not the right way to go.
There's some discussion of this sort of thing in prc-tools starting at
http://www.acm.rpi.edu/~albert/pilot/Sep98/0124.html
> 2) Is that a reasonalble way to go?
Unfortunately, I think it's becoming less reasonable. Current versions
of prc-tools include separate copies of v1, v2, and v3 includes. (Okay,
the v3 ones aren't there, but in practice you can just add them in
parallel.) This is becoming less and less maintainable: I'm making
major changes in the compiler and in the Palm OS header files for the
upcoming prc-tools release, and it's going to be a major pain to duplicate
those changes in the old header files.
(Should we be talking gcc-specific stuff on this list when we have
pilot.programmer.gcc? Hey, why not, there's plenty of CodeWarrior-
specific talk here... :-))
> 3) Is there a good reason to switch to using OS 3.x include files?
Just as assuming OS 2 instead of OS 1 gave you PrintF, assuming various
incarnations of OS 3 gives you all sorts of goodies... Oh, but that's an
answer to "switch to OS 3.x", and you asked "switch to OS 3.x includes".
Okay. More to the point, these are, I imagine, the only ones that are
supported by Palm. This means that the old ones are going to atrophy
(and they already are -- cf the pain in using floating point with gcc
and os2 includes).
> 4) I assume, that with GCC, this just means copying new header files
> to the System, UI, and Hardware to upgrade from 2.0 to 3.x. Or
> are there other files that need to be moved from the SDK to the
> GCC file area?
If you're doing simple stuff, that's it. "Simple stuff" basically
means "not networking" -- see the recent pilot.programmer.gcc thread
entitled "berkeley net api - missing files".
> 5) Anything else I should understand in making a decision on which
> OS version to develope for?
There are more political issues than technical issues I think. (ie,
"Is it more important to allow Palm III to beam or to support people
with Palm Pilots -- oh, but if I work a little harder as a developer
I can do both" is a political issue.) And in fact, we've talked about
this one before on this list, so there should be some interesting data
in the archives.
John
