Ones and Zeros

Sometimes it’s just one thing after another.  It’s been like that in my coding lately.  I need a plotting/graphic library for an iPhone app I’m writing.  I could write one, but it’s faster if I found one that I could use.  I’d prefer to focus on my app instead of writing a library.  Lo and behold; there was Google’s core-plot for the iPhone.  Wonderful!  Looks like it’s probably quality code and appears well supported.

It was archived under Mercurial source code control system in Google’s code website area.  So I needed Mercurial.  No problem.  I found an install for my Mac, I don’t even need to build from its source.

Ah.  The install doesn’t work.  It hangs and has problems with my Python version.  (Mercurial is very Python dependent, much of it is written in Python with a few native extensions.)  So I’ll install the necessary Python version.  But it still doesn’t install.  Several experiments (and days) later I decide to build from source.

Hm.  That doesn’t work either.  I start tracing and fixing problems: wrong SDK, wrong gcc version.  Of course the build process isn’t in an old-fashioned Makefile that everyone knows, but a new (to me at least) Python build process.  That means two things to learn: the build process and the Mercurial build.

Remember core-plot?  That’s what the goal is.  Actually, the goal is my app.

I’ll spare you the details of the more days working out the problems, downloading the correction older SDK and gcc and working it all out.  I finally was able to execute the one command to get the core-plot source locally on my machine.  I think some inconsistencies in my system installation with Python and the SDK/gcc version issues threw off the Mercurial build/install process.  It’s designed for an older system release than I have.

This is one reason that software development can take longer than expected.  There’s always some “little” problem that becomes another problems and so on.  This one’s resolved, but there will be others. I try to be positive and consider it job security.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 13:29 and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.