I am corresponding with Bradley Roberts regarding his problems with installing Ifeffit on his machine. In so far as I know there have been no problems with the installer, but to be sure I have rebuilt the installer with the latest version of horae-060. I then used this installer to install Ifeffit on a freshly installed 10.4.5 system (a pismo that was gathering dust and had a new hard disk in it with just the OS). This machine had *no* software other than the OS and X11 installed. After installing Ifeffit with my latest installer build, Ifeffit worked fine (I started each binary and checked that the graphics and Tk panels show up fine). Conclusion, the mac installer is fully functional. Other than Bradley's problems (which may be unique to his system), I have not heard of any other problems. Has anyone else seen any problems with the Ifeffit-1.2.8-Mac10.4_pkg.dmg installer? Matt, I was wondering if it would be cool to add the horae version to the installer name using some predetermined format). As it stands, it is hard to know how old each release is. The windows installer selfupdates so this shouldn't be a problem, but as the horae_update script is at least for the moment broken, I am trying to release a new mac binary installer every time Bruce comes out with a new version (for people who don't want to bother installing a development environment to compile the latest horae version). Paul

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

Hmm. Sounds pretty easy. Since it would be in an applescript, it sounds like it would be easy to put up a dialog box asking if the user wanted to download the latest update. A framework might go like this (within the athena/artemis/hephaestus scripts) 1. Did we update today, yes -> startup horae 2. Curl over the latest copy of a fixed file like http:// cars.uchicago.edu/ifeffit/updates/current_mac.dat 3. If update not available -> startup horae 4. Ask the user if they would like to update giving them the new version 5. Grab the new version of the installer via curl (would it be better to get it from sourceforge via an indirect from cars?) 6. Start up the installer, user interacts with installer 7. Tell the user to run horae again with the new version 8. stop The idea would be to use the same AppleScript file as is now used for starting up a horae element, fork off a shell script that would check for updates and return a result code that indicated if one is available (e.g. 0 no updates, 1 means update). The current version could be grep'd from one of the executables that live in the Ifeffit folder (is there an official way to get the version number?). Does this sort of plan sound reasonable. The installer would be started and would be waiting for the user to click OK. I don't think doing these automatically beyond this point is really advisable. On Feb 20, 2006, at 12:49 PM, Matt Newville wrote:

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 wrote:

...

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

_______________________________________________ Ifeffit mailing list Ifeffit@millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/ifeffit

On Wednesday 15 February 2006 20:26, Paul Fons wrote:

Matt, I was wondering if it would be cool to add the horae version to   the installer name using some predetermined format).  As it stands,   it is hard to know how old each release is.  The windows installer   selfupdates so this shouldn't be a problem, but as the horae_update   script is at least for the moment broken, I am trying to release a   new mac binary installer every time Bruce comes out with a new   version (for people who don't want to bother installing a development   environment to compile the latest horae version).

I also have no problem with whatever naming scheme you think is helpful for the Mac. As for the horae_update script -- I am not averse to your relying on it or a similar concept. I just don't want to continue trying to support it. You might, for instance, want to get something of that sort working well on the Mac (perhaps downloading from cars rather than from SourceForge) and have the Ifeffit installer give the user the option of making a cron job (or whatever that's called on the Mac) out of the updater. B -- Bruce Ravel ---------------------------------------------- bravel@anl.gov Molecular Environmental Science Group, Building 203, Room E-165 MRCAT, Sector 10, Advanced Photon Source, Building 433, Room B007 Argonne National Laboratory phone and voice mail: (1) 630 252 5033 Argonne IL 60439, USA fax: (1) 630 252 9793 My homepage: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/