ralph@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk (Ralph Martin) (04/18/88)
It seems to me that Hypercard has one helluva problem coming up real soon now: People will wish to update Hypercard, the application, and Hypercard stacks. Now, the former may not be too difficult to do with Installer scripts, and so on (remember that many people will have added icons, XFCNs and so on to their own copies of Hypercard), but much nastier will be upgrading stacks. The essential problem is that the code and data are all mixed together (just the thing that resources was supposed to prevent!), so the problem is when a new version of e.g. the Datebook stack comes out, people will want to shovel their old data in with the new scripts, layouts and so on. At present, doing it by hand is possible, albeit tedious, and not entirely without pitfalls (e.g. if you copy a card to the new version of the stack, and scripts refer to it explicitly by i.d. number, your gonna have to patch all those scripts). The alternative is for some sort of update script to do the thing automatically but if people have tailored their stacks to suit themselves, there is a good chance such scripts will fall over. It seems that flexibility of use leads to great difficulties in updating. Does anyone out there, especially at Apple, have some words of wisdom to offer on this problem?