Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 9:17 pm Post subject: I hate Panther
Well surprise, surprise. Apple releases a "security update" (Mac OS 10.3. and suddenly Neo/J starts crashes in all sorts of weird places. This seems to happen about every other Panther update.
What really makes me angry with this update is that all of the crash logs crash randomly which makes me suspect that this update is causing applications like Neo/J to run out of memory.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of half-baked code Apple is stuffing into these updates. In particular, why are they screwing with the graphics APIs so much that are screws up their own Java code.
Honestly, it is this kind of flakiness in the core frameworks that makes me ready to park Neo/J for a few months and wait until Apple stops doing updates to Panther. Doing any work is just more weeks of my life flushed down the drain after which Apple will probably push out another update and the cycle starts all over again.
At this point in time, my primary goal is to get a donor who can fund the several months of development that I need to switch all my Java code to Carbon windows and CGGraphics graphic contexts. I am sick and tired of having to reverse engineer their core frameworks and while Java 1.3.1 is flaky, Java 1.4.x has a whole host of things that need to be implemented.
Jaguar is so stable and my machine so old that I don't see the neccessity to put down 149€ for an "upgrade". My next version of Mac OS will be Tiger when I replace my old hardware with a Mac mini later in the year.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 9:27 am Post subject:
I definitely sympathize with Patrick's dilemma. Sometimes even at work I have to deal with unpredictable reports each time there's a system update which can be disturbing.
I wouldn't count on Tiger being great in the stability dept. for older apps, though; the Carbon app I write at work broke between 10.2 and 10.3, and I dutifully expect that it will be broken on 10.4. And that's using solely traditional Carbon APIs (granted, they're deprecated, but they should still work IMHO...).
That can only mean that 10.4 is going to break NeoJ in some way since the old 1.3.1 VM is definitely a Carbon app that is using deprecated methods (e.g. NewWindow). Since it really isn't actively developed any longer we definitely need to move off of it to 1.5 or something else. Even if 10.4 supports the older VM, I wouldn't count on that support as being rock-solid.
So we're left with moving from 1.3.1 to 1.4/5 which also implies a shift from Cocoa to Carbon meaning a lot of underlying workarounds for drawing, menu tracking, DnD, etc. that are presently done in Carbon need to change too.
Ick.
Perhaps we should move to a more mature, stable technology like X11
I am one of those linux guys And I can't post photos of my SO because you would all go nuts... Think 1.79 m blond French girl...
Any way back to business now - OOo on Linux rocks. And files from Mac and Windows versions circulate in our home LAN with no problems other than everyone not using the same fonts.
The Mac mini may mean that I move back to Mac OS X from Linux where I have been since the Mac OS 7 debacle I am very comfortable in Linux. More so than Mac OS X where I have broken printing and can not get it fixed short of a full system reinstall. I find some things in Mac OS X to be easier than in Linux but not all (shock horror!). An end user shouldn't be able to screw up Print center, period. I had a kernel oops ripping a CD to iTunes last week. Never had anything similar with grip, ever...
Basically what Linux is missing is iLife type products - I can't just plug my digital camera in and download to gphoto the hardware support is too limited.
What the Mac is missing is a free/open DVB solution - I cant plug in a DVB-S card and record TV to disk and play mpeg2 video back with hardware acceleration for example. So it looks like I am stuck with having two boxes for some time now. That isn't a hassle because I have become a *nix geek and most what I learnt in Linux can be transposed to OS X.
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 5:02 am Post subject:
I used Linux for a while, and still do sometimes. I had to shift to Linux when my NeXTSTEP system (on intel box, but I still have a running NextStation) went too far behind the edge. I love the open source belief, and, as you do, I thought that everything is possible with Linux. I'm mainly a *nix guy.
Anyway, after OS X came out, and as soon as I was able to afford it, I bough a Titanium and I can assure than it was a true relief to work on it. Now when I have to do some work under Linux, most of the time it's some sort of a chore.
About the printing system, it's CUPS on both side, and you can screw it the same. BUT when it comes to printing, OS X wins hands down. I know how hard I had to work to get my Canon photo printer give photo quality prints on Linux. My posts on the matter on the Linuxprinting site did bring me requests for help for a while.
So, yes, this is a proprietary os, too bad, but it's the best, overall.
Max
P.S. I was tempted to write in French for once, but i'd have been rude for folks. How long for true self translating BB?
i dorked around with linux for a bit, but when i (and i consider myself a relatively well-knowledged geek) couldn't figure out how to install anything, i stopped. it was bad enough that i have to hand edit config files to the the airport to work so i could download an update so the internal ethernet port would work...
My only brush with alternative OSes was when I put a BeOS partition on my PowerCenter (PowerComputing was handing out BeOS free at one time) in undergrad. I could sorta surf the web with NetPositive(?). There was also some sort of attempted dalliance with some incarnation of LinuxPPC or the other also on that machine, but it never quite made it on the HD as I recall.
But back to the origin of this thread: I think I'll hold off on 10.3.8 for a while
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 5:54 am Post subject: Re: I hate Panther
pluby wrote:
At this point in time, my primary goal is to get a donor who can fund the several months of development that I need to switch all my Java code to Carbon windows and CGGraphics graphic contexts.
CGGraphics is not but aren't Carbon Frameworks deprecated as a whole? Or only parts of them.
OPENSTEP wrote:
And that's using solely traditional Carbon APIs (granted, they're deprecated, but they should still work IMHO...).
he also wrote:
So we're left with moving from 1.3.1 to 1.4/5 which also implies a shift from Cocoa to Carbon meaning a lot of underlying workarounds for drawing, menu tracking, DnD, etc. that are presently done in Carbon need to change too.
I presume we should read "a shift from Carbon to Cocoa"?
If you, Patrick and Ed, find funds to do this work, the way to go should to use Cocoa where possible, and from other post it seems there is few room for object model, CGGraphics for raw drawing and as few Carbon as possible. Is that right?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:16 am Post subject:
Carbon itself isn't being officially deprecated, but parts of it definitely are (e.g. QuickDraw will no longer be updated, CoreGraphics will). Carbon can never really be discarded since it'd mean ostracizing quite a fair number of not-so-trivial applications (*cough* Photoshop *cough* Quark *hack*). Many of the new interfaces are getting Obj-C bindings only, though, making the Carbon developer's life a bit more troublesome...
The only bad thing is that by deprecating the old-style Carbon interfaces it's implied old-style Carbon apps will need to move off of them...but 1.3 VM is one of those style apps...
For what it's worth: current release of NeoJ beta patch 5 is as stable as ever on Mac OS X 10.3.8. Have had it running for houres on end and no chrashes. I suppose Patrick has troubles with the new builds/patches with the OS update, not current released version.
(e.g. QuickDraw will no longer be updated, CoreGraphics will).
I guess that means there's hope Apple will one day add EPS printing support to CoreGraphics, then
While we're on this subject, out of curiousity, do you and Patrick report any/some/all things that turn out to be OS "bugs" to Apple? There are certainly some things that have an end-user angle to them that we can send via Mac OS X Feedback (can't use 3rd party Arabic/Hebrew/etc. fonts with Neo/J because Apple's text layout engine supports only a tiny bit of the OTF spec and not what's needed to correctly display and join RTL stuff--"I have a 3rd party OTF Arabic font that doesn't join letters in TextEdit."), but I'm having more difficulty figuring out how, as an end user, to report something like bug 303, esp. since Neo/J is the only thing outside of parts of the International prefpane that is Arabic-localized.... The EPS printing one is even farther afield.
Anyway. Just wondering.
Fredrik Stendahl wrote:
For what it's worth: current release of NeoJ beta patch 5 is as stable as ever on Mac OS X 10.3.8. Have had it running for houres on end and no chrashes. I suppose Patrick has troubles with the new builds/patches with the OS update, not current released version.
I don't know what Patrick was referring to particularly (I'm not a mind reader), but Bugzilla seems to indicate lots of folks suddenly appearing with random crashes in 10.3.8, and I find it difficult to imagine all of them are running testpatches after Patch-5 Glad to hear it's not unstable for you, though
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
10.3.8 is a bad patch. i read a lot of bad report about it, and I had to de-install it and goes back to 10.3.5, 'cause it has the same bug of 10.3.6 and 10.3.7: plugging a external monitor with a sleeping powerbook 12'', the powerbook freeze; unplugging an external monitor from a sleeping powerbook 12'', the cursor disappear, and you are forced to reboot.
I'm sad for pluby, I can understand how have to be frustrating have so much work to do to have a stable release, working on a Os that is not helping you to end your work.
I'll try to talk with steve tonight and I'll see what I can do.
About the printing system, it's CUPS on both side, and you can screw it the same. BUT when it comes to printing, OS X wins hands down. I know how hard I had to work to get my Canon photo printer give photo quality prints on Linux. My posts on the matter on the Linuxprinting site did bring me requests for help for a while.
Cool! Someone who can fix my printing then. The printer (epson stylus photo) is on the Linux box and configured via the web interface and some editing of the cupsd.conf. I do accord that the Redhat GUI for setting up printing is a s bad as Print Center. The epson drivers are identical on both machines when it comes to quality of output.
I can see the printer from the Linux box and from a W-XP box but not from the Mac. I have tried Print Center Repair and all of the hacks I found in Google. Double click on Print Center = beach ball for hours on end. When the "add printer" dialog pops up I can't type in the IP address of the printer - no more than 3 or 4 characters then it locks up.
I installed a printer on Fedora Core at a client just the other day - it was no harder than on Mac OS X (and it works).
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and suddenly Neo/J starts crashes in all sorts of weird places. This seems to happen about every other Panther update.
And I can't post photos of my SO because you would all go nuts... Think 1.79 m blond French girl...
I am very comfortable in Linux. More so than Mac OS X where I have broken printing and can not get it fixed short of a full system reinstall. I find some things in Mac OS X to be easier than in Linux but not all (shock horror!). An end user shouldn't be able to screw up Print center, period. I had a kernel oops ripping a CD to iTunes last week. Never had anything similar with grip, ever...
