Re: [Rubycocoa-talk] Undefined constants?

[Jonathan P. <jp...@dc...>]

On 22 Sep 2005, at 20:09, Dave Howell wrote:

> On Sep 22, 2005, at 7:21, Jonathan Paisley wrote:
>
>> Ah - my apologies for not checking this. I found the constant in  
>> my rubycocoa, but I'm running the CVS version so didn't think that  
>> it might not have been there before.
>>
>
> A solution proposed for a different problem I was having was to  
> "install darwinports." For this one, will only upgrading via CVS  
> get me the version that has the constants defined? And to what,  
> exactly, would I be upgrading to?

The 0.4.1 release of RubyCocoa does not have the constants. No newer  
version has yet been released. The 'CVS' version refers to whatever  
is the latest code changes made by the developers and committed to  
the CVS system (see, for example [1] and [2] to find out more about  
what CVS is).

Releases are generally made when developers feel the updates made to  
the code are ready for public consumption. This means that the  
current CVS version may contain bugs or other unexpected behaviour.  
However, it's the only way to get newer features before they're given  
a versioned (e.g., 0.4.2) release.

In summary: the CVS version is likely to contain more features and  
also bugfixes against 0.4.1, but may also introduce other bugs that  
may come to bite you.

A temporary work-around would be to give the actual value for the  
constant. For example, NSScreenSaverWindowLevel is 1000. However,  
these 'constants' are defined in such a way by Mac OS X that they are  
derived at run-time (this is the reason that 0.4.1 doesn't support  
them), so it's not something to be relied upon long-term.

Jonathan


[1] http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/
[2] http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Introduction