Re: Getting a carbon's info string

FROM : Ricky Sharp
DATE : Fri Nov 05 19:09:32 2004

On Friday, November 05, 2004, at 09:51AM, Dan Saul <daniel.<email_removed>> wrote:

>Wow you really went in depth there, I thank you for that, however I
>suppose due to to my lack of clarity, what i meant was to get the
>version of the app itself. What I am trying to do is  write an
>updating system for game, so I need to get the version number of the
>game before I can act on it.


Ah yes, this is a totally different beast :)

>For applications with info(strings) that is easy, but for carbon
>applications not so much.


I think you'll find that there are effectively three types of Carbon apps (binaries):

* Non-bundled CFM (contains 'vers' and 'plst' resource in the resource fork)
* Bundled CFM (contains 'vers' resource and a separate .plist file)
* Bundled mach-o (contains just a .plist file)

Having said that, there's two APIs you can read up on that should give you the proper info.  Both are defined in CFBundle.h:

CFBundleGetVersionNumber
CFBundleGetValueForInfoDictionaryKey

Note: The 'vers' resource does store version information, but for use by Mac OS 9.x and earlier only.  Although, I don't know what Mac OS X does which such apps that omit the version key from their plist, but do provide a 'vers' resource.  Hopefully that's considered a malformed plist and that developers didn't do such a thing.

--
Rick Sharp
Instant Interactive(tm)