tcl-mac

[MACTCL] Deprecated Cocoa methods

[Torsten B. <re...@ma...>]

Hi,

I had a look into the code for the dialogs on the Mac (tkMacOSXDialog.c) and found a Cocoa method there that has been marked deprecated by Apple for OS X 10.6. It is the method 'runModalForDirectory' that is used e.g. in the code for tk_getOpenFile:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/cocoa/reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSOpenPanel_Class/DeprecationAppendix/AppendixADeprecatedAPI.html

Apple says, the method 'runModal' should be used instead. This is a method that existed since Mac OS X 10.0 and as such would not cause any trouble with Tk-Cocoa running on older versions of OS X.

What is the feeling in the Tcl community? Should we keep using deprecated methods until Apple removes them or should we actively try to maintain the code and update these methods when such issues are emerging?

I haven't looked if there are other methods in this category, but there might well be more.

Regards, Torsten

Re: [MACTCL] Deprecated Cocoa methods

[Clifford Y. <cli...@gm...>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Torsten Berg <re...@ma...> wrote:

> What is the feeling in the Tcl community? Should we keep using deprecated methods until
> Apple removes them or should we actively try to maintain the code and update these
> methods when such issues are emerging?

Personally my opinion would be to start working on removing deprecated
calls as soon as they are deprecated  (or if not removing them,
conditionalizing them to be used only on earlier releases where that's
the only option) - there could be non-trivial issues to figure out and
that way Tcl/Tk doesn't get caught with an unsupported Mac OSX
release.

CY

Re: [MACTCL] Deprecated Cocoa methods

[Kevin W. <kw...@co...>]

On 9/27/12 2:42 PM, Torsten Berg wrote:

> Apple says, the method 'runModal' should be used instead. This is a method that existed since Mac OS X 10.0 and as such would not cause any trouble with Tk-Cocoa running on older versions of OS X.
>
> What is the feeling in the Tcl community? Should we keep using deprecated methods until Apple removes them or should we actively try to maintain the code and update these methods when such issues are emerging?
>

My take is that given the other remaining issues with Tk-Cocoa and my 
own available time, updating deprecated methods is low priority. In 
response to another suggestion on this thread, I also am reluctant to 
load up Tk with a lot of OS-version-dependent API calls: the baseline 
supported version of Tk-Cocoa is 10.5 and that's where it should stay 
absent some huge reason to move it. (The shift to 64-bit and the 
significant changes in Objective-C with 10.5 merited such a baseline shift.)

One deprecated method that I haven't figured out how to address yet is 
garbage collection: Apple seems to be aggressively deprecating it in 
favor of automatic reference counting (ARC), and I haven't delved into 
the implications of this for Tk. It may not be necessary to worry about 
at all because Daniel Steffen designed Tk-Cocoa to support both GC and 
standard memory management, but it's something I will have to look at at 
some point.

If someone wants to submit a patch or two to address deprecated calls 
and they can be applied without breaking the 10.5 baseline of 
support--i.e., they don't require wrapping in an #ifdef to specify a 
later version of OS X--then I would be happy to review and include those.

--Kevin


-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com