Panther tickets

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 09:22:51PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt said:
[...]
>
> This is the second time you've closed this ticket for the sole reason  
> that the problem occurs only on Panther. I previously reopened this  
> ticket explaining that's not a good reason for closing. You've closed  
> other tickets for the same reason. Up to now, we have not had a policy of 
> closing tickets for the sole reason that they are Panther-specific. While 
> we do not officially support Panther, the policy thus far has been that we 
> would still accept patches to fix things for Panther. I find it useful to 
> have bug reports filed for issues, even if a fix is not immediately known, 
> that way interested parties can see the report and Cc themselves and offer 
> input. The number of open tickets in the database has no bearing on this. 
> If you would like MacPorts to adopt a policy of declining to fix Panther 
> issues and immediately closing Panther tickets, let's discuss that 
> proposal here.

The number of open tickets does affect one's ability to go through the list
of old, open tickets looking for things to fix.  Granted, you can look
(usually) in the summary, or opening the ticket to see in the description,
that it is against 10.3 and move on, but it's still just one more thing to
deal with.

For MacPorts on 10.3, without some major changes to base either in redoing
some of the GSoC privileges code or bringing in an implementation of lchown,
MacPorts trunk/1.8 isn't going to even build on 10.3.  With 10.6 looming and
MacPorts' continual shortness of people contributing (especially on base,
and more especially on base for 10.3), I really don't think even vaguely
hinting that supporting 10.3 is all that honest for us at this point.
Personally I don't think that is fair to the users, and I am sorry for those
still using 10.3 but if we don't have anyone actively using 10.3 and
developing on MacPorts, we need to be true to what can be done.

>
> My feeling was that getting the gcc4 ports working again on Panther was of 
> particular importance, since otherwise no software that requires gcc 4.x 
> can be compiled on Panther, since Panther's Xcode 1.5 only includes gcc 
> 3.3. That is why I filed some gcc tickets and added comments to others.

Do we know if anyone is actually attempting to get any gcc4 building on
10.3?  Also, for real support wouldn't we need to bring in Apple's patches
against gcc4 (like gcc 4.0.1 on Xcode 2+) to truly bring support of gcc4?  I
know there are some things which compile fine with Xcode's gcc but not with
one of the ports.

Bryan