[mythtv] Making MythTV more OSX Friendly

Jeremiah Morris jm at whpress.com
Tue Jan 25 13:23:00 EST 2005


On 25 Jan 2005, at 12:32 PM, Patrick Tescher wrote:

> Well I guess the real question is: how big is QT + lame + freetype?

No, that's not the question. Regardless of their size, you still have 
numerous problems with separating the frameworks:

- If they aren't bundled, you need an installer instead of a 
drag-and-drop application. That also requires authentication, which is 
one of my least favorite consequences of installers.

- If the user removes them, the application will fail with no friendly 
error message, just the system crash dialog. Not a good user 
experience.

- If a different version of a library is installed in the same place, 
you could get random crashes due to incompatibilities, and MythTV gets 
unfairly labeled as buggy.

- It makes it harder for the user to uninstall. If it's not in one 
bundle, then they aren't sure if everything is cleaned up. If you have 
an uninstall script, it could remove something in use by another 
application. Either way, it's more of a hassle than dragging 
MythFrontend.app to the trash.

- Myth releases only occur once every few months; by the time a user is 
ready to upgrade, the releases of Qt, etc. will have changed anyway. 
(CVS binaries are a different point, but that's a limited audience I'm 
ignoring for the sake of this discussion.)

I was a Mac shareware developer for a few years, I know that these 
issues can give software a bad reputation, and create big support 
headaches for the community. A few megabytes of overhead is better than 
the potential for bad feelings among both the Mac and Myth communities.

- Jeremiah



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list