The case of the lost documentation
A few weeks ago I “applied” a new ADC documentation update with a not so happy result: the documentation “application” couldn’t find anything!
I did a Google search: nothing, I did a search in Apple’s developers site: nothing. Damn! I was frustrated, I was sure it was an innocent dumb newbie problem.
Last night I was so mad about it that decided to fixed it no matter what. I began to look at the documentation errors with more detail, trying to find with Spotlight the html files I got no results. I returned to Apple’s documentation downloads and checking what was the updated I “applied” and I realized it was the PDF only update and on my machine I had only PDFs…
So, I look for the download with no PDFs ( the one with the html files ) which in fact is like a third of the size of the other and launch the installer and after a long wait…everything was working with the documentation!
Now, the real question is: What had happened? Well, some times there is nothing like getting some sleep, this morning I was checking the email and BAM! I knew the answer.
It is a “switcher” problem! On Windows when you copy & paste a directory tree named MYDIR from one location to another MYDIR on another location, the file explorer gives you a warning about doing a replace and if you continue it will do a replace of the files by name AND a MERGE! It will not delete & paste the new MYDIR but it will replace file by file if they match name and extension AND add the non existing directories and files.
That was it, I was used to that behaviour so when the Finder asked me if I wanted to REPLACE the directory I naturally did that, then the pasting of the PDFs documentation update directory did a REPLACE when I was really expecting a REPLACE & MERGE operation.
Obviously the Mac version of the REPLACE operation is semantically correct.