My one complaint with the setup described is that the script for the “Run Script” build phase described there is a maintenance headache that I could do without.  Here’s my solution:  Create two new build targets, both of the “Shell Script” type–these are targets that just run a shell script, so they are created with only a “Run Script” build phase.  I called my two new targets “Create/Update English .strings files” and “Create/Update l10n XIBs” but you can call them whatever you want.

In the “Create/Update English .strings files” target’s “Run Script” phase, the script is:

This uses ibtool to create a strings file for every XIB in the English localization (from foo.xib, foo.xib.strings will be created).

In the “Create/Update l10n XIBs” target’s “Run Script” phase, the script is:

This goes through every .lproj directory except English.lproj and uses ibtool to apply the .xib.strings files in those localizations to the XIB files in English.lproj.

By having these as two separate targets, they aren’t run every time I build and each part can be run on its own, on demand.  By using the power of shell scripting, I avoid having to alter the scripts for every new localization or XIB.

This takes the CFBundleVersion from the project’s Info.plist, adds a period and the subversion revision number, and injects that into the Info.plist of the built product.

When I made the move to Mercurial, I couldn’t quite do this anymore.  While subversion revision numbers are monotone increasing and consistent everywhere (they are the unique identifiers of a particular version), Mercurial’s “revision numbers” are local to a particular instance of the repository and may not match up from one instance to another.  Mercurial uses a hash as the unique identifier of a particular version, and these hexadecimal hashes are not monotone, making them unsuitable for use in CFBundleVersion.

Though it took some time, I’ve finally come to a system with Mercurial that I think is workable:

This calculates the number of minutes between the most recent tagged ancestor of the tip and the tip itself and adds that to the CFBundleVersion.  Because it’s time-based, it is guaranteed to be monotone increasing, consistent, and unique (well, provided multiple commits don’t happen within a 1-minute span, which is safe for me).

… because I had “Visible At Launch” checked for the NSPanel that is my sheet in Interface Builder.  Unchecking that fixed everything, no RunLoop or otherwise delayed-running machinations needed.

There aren’t a whole lot of little details like that for me to point to and say “see?  Vim is better!”  Ultimately, what it comes down to is that I am eager to have to do something like PHP programming or web site maintenance for which I’ll use Vim.

aslj_client

aslj_users

(As it is very LJ-centric, most of the information about it will be over at LJ, in the two places linked above, but there is a page for it here, as well.)