Using 2.0 and 1.2 on the same machine

Hi James,

Glad to finally see 2.0 beta

Looks promising.

I'd like to start using the beta for some of my archives and keep other archives on 1.2 for a while in case something goes haywire. All actions (weekly captures in essence) for those legacy archives would be started manually form the old version, while all scheduled actions would run with updated 2.0 archives. Is this possible? From what I've understood so far, the preferences might be a problem.

What would be your advice to make a save transition? I hesitate throwing everything on a beta at once.

Johannes

Johannes,

My stock answer to this question is "No, you can't run two versions of QRecall simultaneously."

The problem is that all versions of QRecall are going to use the same set of resources (preferences, schedule, action documents, status files, archives, and so on). And much more complicated is the fact that QRecall installs a number of system services. These services are all identified by name ("com.qrecall.scheduler" for example). OS X doesn't allow two or more services to be registered with the same name, and QRecall (for security reasons) will refuse to use any service or component that's not the exact same version. So there can only be one scheduler service running, and only the same version of QRecall will talk to that scheduler, which effectively limits the usable versions to one.

Having said all of that, there might be a one-time-only exception as we transition from 1.2 to 2.0. QRecall 2.0 uses a different (safer, more secure) launch mechanism for running privileged commands, like a capture. Because of this, it might be possible to install QRecall 1.2 in user account A and QRecall 2.0 in user account B as long as both users have the "Run actions when logged out" option turned off.

In this situation, all QRecall user services (monitor, scheduler, system service, spotlight importer, and so on) will be installed in that user's account, and just for that user. The only system service that need to be installed is the privileged launch mechanism, but since 1.2 and 2.0 use different mechanisms, they shouldn't stomp on either other.

Warning: This is entirely theoretical, so install at your own risk. If you run into problems, please let me know that you're also running a parallel copy of QRecall 1.2 in any bug reports.