(My last response on that topic. Promised! :-)
I'm sorry if I didn't make my point clear. My understanding is that Palm
wants to target the enterprise market, with potentially large business
applications. In large projects, a stable, reliable, carefully maintained
and enhanced API to program to is extremely important.
The Windows program I wrote two years ago still compiles unchanged with the
lastest version of VC++/WinSDK. (Well, I can't use the Palm Conduit SDK with
the latest version of VC++, but now that's a completely different story...
;-)
While to one programmer, DWord might be less intuitive than UInt32, and
MemHandle might sound better than VoidHand, to the other it may be the other
way round. IMHO, this does not justify API changes. APIs, once published,
should be cast in stone, except for serious flaws like the const pointer
problems.
Yes I know I can twiddle with shell scripts to replace all the types and
casts. But what about sources in source code control systems? What about
headers of third party libraries? What if I had defined private types or
variables with the new type names?
(BTW, Aaron: With the sed example you gave all files will be zeroed -
standard Unix gotcha - have to use temp files).
Since even the 3.1 SDK is labelled prerelease Alpha 1 yet, I'm not
immediately concerned. I'm sticking to 3.0 and that's just fine. The problem
is, once I need to use one of the new features available in later versions
of PalmOS, I have to upgrade the SDK on my machine and in turn have to go
through all my sources.
About shared development: To work with the new sources in a shared project
you have to install the latest version of the SDK on every developer's
machine. Once you do this, all the other (totally unrelated) sources
maintained on that machine are, well, not toast, but broken. This creates a
chain reaction. At the end, we all have the new SDKs installed and,
admittedly, much prettier code, but it still is a lot of work w/o any
immediate benefit.
Please don't take my comments as nit-picking.
I really appreciate all the work that is done
in making PalmOS a great, mature operating system.
Just my 0.02EUR.
Thanks,
Andreas
