New tool to aid RISCOS Ltd and Castle RISC OS development
Posted by Andrew Hodgkinson Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:36:00 GMT
As a part of the joint co-operation between RISC OS Open and RISCOS Ltd, we are please to announce the availability of a tool which we hope will help to make life a little bit easier for developers. It is aimed at gathering some specific statistics from a wide range of RISC OS users in order for us to better identify where the main problem areas lie with respect to the differences between the RISCOS Ltd RISC OS branch and the Castle Technology RISC OS branch.
The EnsureScan program will search for applications in a specific location on your computer, for example in a specified directory (defaulting to $.Apps) or all of a specified hard disc.
During the scanning process, it will look for applications and when it finds one, it will look at any !Boot or !Run file inside the application to build a list of all of the modules which are required by that application. It does this by looking for RMEnsure commands in those files, hence the name of this program, as those commands indicate that the application requires that a certain module of at least a certain version number in order to function correctly.
The reason for doing this scan is simply to gather information from a large cross-section of the community about which modules are required by applications. We aren’t tracking what applications each user has or what modules each application requires.
The data collected is simply: how many times during the scan was a given module seen in an RMEnsure command and what version numbers of modules are being asked for? This is useful because it will indicate which modules are important to developers and that in itself helps to focus attention on solving problems where separate streams of development of those modules means that a simple version number check (as per RMEnsure) is no longer sufficient.
If we want to find ways to make it simpler for developers to ensure that their applications have access to versions of a module which provide specific features and/or bug fixes, then gathering this information is an important first step.
Just install and run !EnsureScn, then e-mail the results from it back to us at scan@riscosopen.org.
Download your copy of !EnsureScn from here.
Thanks for your help!
