[Development] Frameworks on Mac?

[Rutledge Shawn]

On 22 Nov 2012, at 9:08 AM, Sorvig Morten wrote:

> 
> On Nov 22, 2012, at 6:52 AM, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
> wrote:
>> 
>> That's the point: the conclusion was that the default on Mac is to *not* have 
>> frameworks anymore. It might have been the case in the past, but recently the 
>> trend has been to have regular libraries. Apple themselves are now preferring 
>> that way, by having a full system sysroot shipped with XCode, for each 
>> supported version of Mac OS X.
> 
> The sysroots have frameworks, so the notion that Apple is moving away from frameworks is inaccurate. There are .dylibs as well, mostly for the Darwin layer.
> 
>> 
>> Though I confess I don't understand why the frameworks in 
>> /System/Library/Frameworks have headers inside.
>> 
>> Besides, I'm told that deploying frameworks inside app bundles is harder than 
>> deploying simple shared libraries.
> 
> Not that much harder. I don't think this is a very good argument for dropping framework support.
> 
> I also missed this part of the discussion. Can the case for making non-framework builds the default be presented again?

I don't understand either; I thought that frameworks have the advantage of being shared between applications.  If one application includes Qt 5.0.0 in the .app bundle and another includes 5.0.1, and you run both of them, does it mean that you will have duplicates of all the libraries that those apps need, in memory?  It's bad enough that they will be duplicated on disk, but I know it's becoming the norm not to worry about that, in exchange for not having the problems that Windows often does with incompatible DLL versions.  But we guarantee binary compatibility, so shouldn't it be OK for an application installer to upgrade the system Qt framework at the same time, the way an application's Windows installer would typically do?  (I'm referring to ordinary users rather than developers)