[Pythonmac-SIG] appscript terminology caching

[Bob Ippolito]

On Oct 19, 2004, at 11:03, Eric Nieuwland wrote:

> On 19-okt-04, at 15:15, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> On Oct 19, 2004, at 4:51, Eric Nieuwland wrote:
>>> On 18-okt-04, at 11:21, Jack Jansen wrote:
>>>> On 18 Oct 2004, at 00:47, Eric Nieuwland wrote:
>>>>> How will the caching system handle updates to an application of 
>>>>> which the terminology is cached?
>>>>
>>>> That's one of the problems we're trying to sort out. Has wants to 
>>>> do it automatically whereas Bob and myself seem to tend towards a 
>>>> more manual solution, whereby the script writer somehow explicitly 
>>>> triggers it.
>>>
>>> Why not add a parameter to the indicate whether or not to check for 
>>> changes if the terminology is cached?
>>> You'll have to rely on version numbers in the app to decide if the 
>>> app was updated, but that should be OK.
>>
>> The reason cached terminologies are useful is because *asking* for 
>> terminologies is slow.  If you have to ask if it's updated, you might 
>> as well not have cached it in the first place.  If you don't ask if 
>> it's updated, then it's impossible to know for sure whether or not 
>> your cached terminology is stale.
>
> OK. But to check the version you can access the app's Info.plist. Is 
> that slow as well?

Info.plist isn't guaranteed to change when the application does.  Heck, 
it's not even totally guaranteed to exist (remote apple events, CFM 
apps, OS9 apps running in Classic).

-bob