Build for Classic

[Richard Gaskin]

Jeff Reynolds wrote:

> Dropping os9 is not a solution if you build for the K-6 education  
> market.

I hear you on that.  I know a good many teachers, and it's tragic how 
low their budgets get prioritized, esp. when we consider so many other 
useless things the money gets spent for.

I think you hit on a key point here:

> luckily we just dont use any features past 2.6, so i can keep
> authoring there, then use it to make the classic build and move
> it up to 2.8 to do the  osx and windows builds, but is a bit of
> a pain and i know that murphy will come along and bit me with
> some sort of build specific bug when doing this sort of bifurcated
> build process...

It could be worse:  in the olden days I had clients who supported 
multiple platforms by developing the Mac version in SuperCard and the 
Windows version in ToolBook.  What a nightmare that was.

Most of the new features in v2.7 and v2.8 don't affect Classic at all, 
since they deal with things like Universal Binary, Vista, window buffer 
compositing, etc.

So your strategy of staying with v2.6 still keeps Rev a viable option at 
the modest cost of a little inconvenience at build time.  The one thing 
we know about Classic is that it's not a moving target. :)

Since RunRev did promise at least one more engine for Classic I agree 
they should do so, and the sooner they get it out of the way the better 
for them and everyone else.  As they continue to move the code base 
forward, we can't expect that a Classic build will get any easier.

But I think it's prudent for anyone who needs to deploy to Classic to 
expect that there probably won't be more than one new engine for that 
OS, so sooner or later they'll be in the same spot you're in now, 
building for modern OSes in one version and building for Classic in an 
older one.

With v2.9, v3.0, v4.0 and beyond, any version that includes Classic 
support will be short-lived, so the practice of using two versions of 
Rev will become the norm anyway not long after they release a new 
Classic engine.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com