Making multiple versions of RV available on Mac machine?

RV
1

Hi,
The Windows RV installer places RV in folders which incorporate the rv version number. This allows me to have multiple versions of RV on the computer and launch the exact RV version the production desires. Sometimes productions don’t want any software updates until critical points in production pass. Sometimes a production’s crew doesn’t have time to test a new version of RV so they want to version lock production while they test a new version.
The Mac RV installer overwrites the existing RV.app install which doesn’t incorporate the version number in the name. Is there some reason versioned installs were not supported on Mac? It seems Mac RV runs okay if I rename RV.app to something like RV-2021.0.0.2.app or if I place various RV.app bundles in a folder structure such as /Applications/RV/2021.0.0.3/RV.app but I need to do more testing. I use an application launcher which supplies all the needed environment vars prior to executing RV.
I figured I’d ask here in the case there is a Mac OS specific reason which would prevent multiple versions of RV being installed on the machine and executing a single version at a time. I see there is a /Users/{user_name}/Library/Application Support/RV/ directory which seems largely empty.

2

When I was at Autodesk, putting them in folders or renaming them was how I tested multiple versions at once for ticket support. The biggest conflicts to know:

  1. Depending on how far back you go, some preferences are not backwards compatible nicely. You might find that your preference settings get mangled, especially floating point numbers. This is a Qt compatibility problem (lower than RV), so if you are using different versions that use drastically different Qt versions, you could see your preferences get messed up, usually when moving backward.

  2. The URI associations for things like rvlink:// on OSX are weird, so you might find that it points to a version you didn’t intend. There’s an argument on mac that is something like -registerHandler (you’ll see it in the -help) that you can run on a specific version. But as the fruit company likes to change things a lot between OS versions, YMMV.
    But if you are running it from a wrapper, you probably aren’t relying on rvlink:// pointing at a specific version anyway.

Cheers,
-Kessler

3 Likes