Hi Paul,
Thanks! I think the long name is fine. I'll change the download links
on the ifeffit page Monday morning (Chicago time).
For a Mac OS X auto-updater, I would recommend this as being somewhat
gentler than a cron job: All Ifeffit/Horae applications run from
AppleScript icons first run the shell script
/Applications/Ifeffit/bin/iff_init.sh. This (or .../iff_init.csh) is
also but in startup files for Terminals (that is, .profile or .cshrc),
so that opening a Terminal and typing 'athena' will work.
Right now, /Applications/Ifeffit/bin/iff_init.sh sets environmental
variables for PATH, PGPLOT_DEV, etc and not much else. It would be
simple to write a 'look for updates' script (say, modified from
horae_update or the Windows updater, pointing only to the
cars.uchicago.edu site) and just run that to iff_init.sh. That way,
the updates would be looked for every time someone runs an Ifeffit
application (as opposed to the fixed frequency of a cron job).
This is essentially how the Windows updater work. There, the script
also notes when it last checked for updates so that it doesn't run 10
times a day. The Windows updater does a fast check for "is there a
new version" with a fixed url of
http://cars.uchicago.edu/ifeffit/updates/current.dat
--Matt
On 2/17/06, Paul Fons
Hi Matt, The Mac installer now has the somewhat long winded name ifeffit-1.2.8-Mac10.4_horae60_pkg.dmg . I was wary of changing the name before as it will break the link on cars, but since you are hosting the various installers on cars as well, it would probably be best if to have a clear name so one could be sure the version is the same on both. I thought it might also be prudent to have the installer for 10.3 check the os version (using the gestalt value in the installer) so that incompatible versions don't get installed (the 10.3 perl and Tk will I think break on 10.4). I should do the same for the 10.4 version as well. I may be able to make the same sort of check for the 10.3 package installer as well using the package you built. I can't, however, update the older installer to the new horae version as I don't have a 10.3 system to build it on.
Paul _______________________________________________ Ifeffit mailing list Ifeffit@millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/ifeffit