On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 11:49:27PM -0500, Mark Baran wrote: > Anyway, so far I have only two gripes with shoes. I'm developing on Mac > and I was wondering why the launcher exists. Code that I load any other > way except through the file dialog effective becomes unreachable and > orphaned; I unfortunately have to murder the process and scuff my shoes so > to speak with a killall -9.
Oh, hey, glad to have you, Mark. I have this same gripe with Shoes and I think we're all pretty sick of this bug. I want to call this thing from the commandline! The problem is in Shoes.app/Contents/MacOS. If you change the line "<string>shoes</string>" to "<string>shoes-bin</string>", then the commandline works but the file open dialog is dead. I could really use some help cracking this one. I've tried using LSEnvironment to set all the environment variables: no good. OSX has been an extremely frustrating environment! > Secondly, is there a really pressing reason why this hasn't been packaged > as a RubyGem, even if to only be served locally from why's repo and not > generally distributed yet. Well, I really only have two reasons for writing Shoes: (1) to act as the new runtime for Hackety Hack and (2) as an experimental programming platform for beginners. I don't think Shoes appeals at all to GUI programmers or to the marketplace. I don't even use the acronym GUI anywhere in Shoes docs or materials. I want Shoes to get in the hands of hobbyists and kids!! (I hope all of you do as well?) I think RubyGems is a fine thing, but I'd lose alot of my advantage if I packed Shoes as a gem. * The Shoes installer includes Ruby, the Shoes stuff, and any other libraries I want to pre-package (sqlite3 and hpricot). * The installer is a single download of ~3MB. Most Ruby installers are already much bigger than this. (Recent Win32 installers are 23 MB!!) * The .shy format (compressed Shoes apps) couldn't have a file association through RubyGems. * I will be merging sandbox soon, which will require a custom build of Ruby and prohibit use of RubyGems prior to loading Shoes. I totally welcome arguments to my approach, especially since I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Shoes' independence is a huge strength. I previously was okay with doing a gem, but I think it would hurt the project, you know? You can still load gems through Shoes (esp. using the `fetch_gem` stuff that's in lib/shoes/cache.rb which I developed for Balloon) and I hope to have a shoes-gem command which will install a gem into your Shoes distro. _why
