Today I try to set up my development environment so I can do my work in Mac OS X instead of having to boot into Mac OS 9. Although CVS is installed as a BSD utility, I'd rather have a GUI application. The only one I've found (from Stepwise's excellent Softrak site, another good site is Apple's own Mac OS X Downloads page) is Concurrent Versions Librarian.

Unfortunately I'm having problems installing it. The DP4 version untars as a folder instead of a Mac OS X .app file, so I can't double-click to run it. I don't know how to set it so that it is an application. On the other hand, the Mac OS X server version untars as a package that I can run with the Mac OS X installer. But the installer hangs, probably because it is a Mac OS X server package.

Ok, that failed. So how about using the command line cvs instead? Good Grief, that's a complicated program! Project Builder can't check out a module, but it can use a checked out module to do version control. So maybe I can... foiled again. MacCVS Pro, a fine program that I was using in Mac OS 9, doesn't check out files in CVS format. It uses its own data file to keep track of CVS info, so obviously Project Builder can't use it.

Well, I'm a bit offtrack here. Let's try to create a Java application and see if I can run the OTM. I use MrJAppBuilder, included in the Mac OS X Developer Tools. Since I don't know where all the java class files are kept in Mac OS X (I'm just so lazy, I don't even bother to look for it myself; I did find out that I have J2SE version 1.3 installed) I'll just add all our archives. Bad interface for adding the files -- it always starts in the home directory and you can only choose contiguous files. Once I've added the files I set the main class and the parameter options, then the destination application and click "Build Application" which takes a few seconds.

I start the new application and it sort of works. It starts up with one window but not standard out. It didn't find a file that I included in the application framework, choosing instead to try to find it in the local directory which should have worked since the file is there. Other than that, it's a nice start.

Looking more closely at MrJAppBuilder, it looks like you can specify stdout as either /dev/null or a file. I think it's the same for stdin. Not useful at all since we use the console for some commands. Hmm, looks like I'll have to run it off of the command line, like back in my Windows NT days. MrJAppBuilder is such a primitive program that you can make the window bigger, but you can't make it smaller. Must not use the standard toolbox for its window.

Whew! A dysmal failure on my first serious attempt. I'll have to reorganize and try again tomorrow. First thing will be to research how Java is organized in Mac OS X -- where do I add new archives and are they included automatically or do I need to set an environment option, how do I run a Java program from the command line (should be easy), any other environment options that I need to set? After that I need to seed it with the right jar files that I need and see if I can run an OTM and other servers. I'll worry about code editing and compiling later.

Last note, Adobe released Acrobat 5 for the Mac and it's now in Carbon so you can use it on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, the installer application is Classic, so I can't run it (I'm still refusing to run Classic applications in Mac OS X, and now it's even games). Next time I have to boot into Mac OS 9 I might try to install it if I remember.