Porting Isn’t As Easy As It Seems
Yeah, that almost sounds self-explanatory, but too often it is not. Porting has not been something I have been innately familiar with as nearly all of my projects have started out from scratch or been superficial modifications to an existing codebase… but Porting?! Oooooooohhhhhhhhhhh Porting has turned me into a drinking man.
I have been knee deep in porting two somewhat large FileMaker 4 systems into version 8 performance demons. I simply mean that the feature jump between the two has been so immense that not rebuilding from scratch in v8 seemed like the desire to contruct a skyscraper on quicksand. But, to use my favorite new quote “you either keep your eye on the ball or it hits you in the head”
With regards to Intel Macs and the Microsoft Office suite, there is a very interesting and worthwhile post on the porting of such a major project from the Metrowerks codebase to Xcode. It’s not a walk in the park and the common lament that “Why isn’t _xyz_ doing their job and porting _xyz_ app?” is a suresign that you have your head up your arse. Let me admit that I’ve said that very kind of comment with ease and with a sneer. I’m alarmed at how ignorant that statement was.
There is an equally interesting and juxtaposed writeup on the state of Adobe and Intel Macs over here.
I’ve been porting various databases from FileMaker 5 to FileMaker 7 for about 3 months, and… it… sucks. But it’s paying the bills so I put up with it.
I concur. It’s amazing that they haven’t come up with a the simple tool /function designed to consolidate several files into a single file/multi-table solution. That’s where the bulk of my work has been.