trunk and 10.3 support

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 12:34:57AM -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard said:
> Thanks for the correction - I have a hard time keeping the various  
> releases straight since they all seem to kind of blend into one another 
> for some reason. :-)
>
> I don't think the question is "whether to exclude Panther" (though at  
> almost 6 years old, one wonders how long users might expect open source 
> projects to support it), but rather how much forward progress should be 
> held hostage to releases like Panther.  I believe the original question 
> regarded the implementation of one of the GSoC projects and what to do in 
> the case of an old release, for which my suggestion was simply "punt" 
> given the low reward-to-effort ratio.

Yup, forward progress is what's going to suffer by trying to continue to
support older systems.  Do we want to try and continue to ifdef new features
in base which won't work on 10.3, until base becomes a mass of such
backwards-compatibility ugliness?  Given how few people we have working on
base in the first place, plus how many of them actively use 10.3, trying to
support it will just get worse.

We can claim "we don't specifically drop support for it" but how many people
know that to be true?  I broke 10.3 with the use of lchown() 10 days ago and
just noticed yesterday, only because I was curious whether or not something
completely unrelated (ticket #18719) happened to fix #15814 (it didn't).
Had I not done this exercise in curiosity, how long would it have been?
Would it have been when someone finally went to build DMGs for 1.8.0 on
10.3?

Given our limited resources, the best path I see is to simply drop 10.3 for
trunk/1.8 and see if there are people willing to keep the 1.7 branch working
for 10.3, including perhaps stubbing out Portfile features added in the
future, or maybe even using older Portfiles since more and more ports will
fail to build on 10.3 regardless of base's support for it.

Bryan


>
> - Jordan
>