[Aperture-devel] aperture on osx (and in osgi)

[Gunnar A. G. <gun...@df...>]

Hi all,

I've spent a long overdue hour looking into aperture on osx issues.
Mainly there are some problems with the osgi packaging.

Background
----------
Two things are special for aperture on osx:

* OSX requires special behaviour when crawling files, OSX has the
concept of "bundles", which is actually a directory, but which all
applications treat as a file. Aperture should also treat this as a
single thing. The JVM shipped with osx provides special classes that
lets you check if this flag is set.

* We have two OSX specific crawlers, iPhoto and Apple addressbook. Both
are implemented using Applescript, and another special class in OSX JVM
is used to execute the applescript.

Now - to solve the problem that the special OSX classes are only
available on OSX (surprise), we've split them into a separate library,
which can only be compiled on OSX, and we take care only to call methods
in this library when running on OSX.

Problems:
---------

* In the current aperture.runtime-onejar the .applescript file is
missing for iphoto (although it's in svn)

* The magic osx class we use for launching applescript from java
(NSAppleScript) is deprecated, and is no longer shipped in the new 1.6 jvm.

* Applescript sucks badly for what we use it for, as it requires the
actual applications to be running. I.e. when crawling iphoto/addressbook
will pop up. (Applescript is slow, and painful to program. )

* For OSGI, the aperture.runtime-onejar does NOT depend on the
aperture.tools.apple-wrapper bundle. It should have an option dependency
for this.

* For OSGI, the osx specific classes are not exposed by OSGI by default,
because they are not in the normal jvm specs. To fix this - one must
write a fragment-bundle that attaches to the system.bundle and exports
these, i.e. a bundle with only a MANIFEST file contained f.x. this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Bundle-ManifestVersion: 2
Bundle-Name: Apple_classes Fragment
Bundle-SymbolicName: apple_classes
Bundle-Version: 1.0.0
Fragment-Host: system.bundle; extension:=framework
Export-Package: com.apple.eawt,apple.laf,com.apple.cocoa.foundation

Actions:
--------

* I propose we delete the iphoto and apple addressbook crawlers. They
have been broken for a long time and noone complained, so they are
clearly not used much. They were never well tested, nor well programmed
and the applescript approach is awful. We can make a ticket for someone
to rewrite them using objective-C, which will let you access the
addressbook database etc. without opening the application.

* Fix the OSGI details :)

Cheers,
- Gunnar