Panther tickets

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 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.

Other build systems support "chroot" building, and with those it  
isn't such a
hassle to build for older systems by using something like a SDK or  
even a full
OS installation in order to test the package after it has been built.  
But since
MacPorts doesn't have that, it makes supporting older releases more  
manual labor ?

I think you should explicitly drop Panther support for MacPorts 1.8  
and beyond,
do something like Fink did: http://www.finkproject.org/news/ (under  
2008-07-23).
However I do think that MP should support Tiger for a while longer,  
even with the
two Leopards, although it makes for supporting three releases. But  
that's just me.


My own reasons for dropping Panther was that my motherboard did on my  
old machine
and because it was easier to use the same SDK (10.4u) when doing  
universal builds.
Before it would use one SDK and one compiler (3.3) on PowerPC and  
another SDK and
another compiler (4.0) on Intel and it made for tricky debugging. So  
I upgraded...

There were a few complaints about Panther missing, but more about  
Leopard issues -
fortunately most of them could be handled by revising the Universal/ 
10.4u build.
These days the issues seems to mostly be about 64-bit Intel rather  
than PowerPC,
but supporting that would require getting a new computer (or do  
"blind" builds).


> 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.

Or just let Panther die with gcc-3.3, just like Jaguar had 3.1 or  
Puma had 2.95 ?

I'm sure there are going to be new stuff that only builds with  
gcc-4.2 and later.

--anders