Kismet and Tiger

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Nov 29, 2010, at 1:23 AM, Ned Deily wrote:

> In article <9B401A82-FC71-4636-9D87-474F44E039F7 at apple.com>,
> "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh at apple.com> 
> wrote:
>> You guys are still supporting Tiger?  Really?  Why?  Even the most die-hard 
>> PPC hold-out can still run Leopard, so it's not like some specific 
>> demographic is going to be locked out by dropping support for anything older 
>> than 10.5?
> 
> Not so.  Tiger is the last release to support G3 Macs: Leopard is not an 
> option for them and those machines are still in use.  Being able to run 
> a compatible set of ports (from 1.9.2) across the 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 
> machines I use for development and testing is a great boon.

I do realize that this is something of a touchy subject, particularly given that someone from Apple is raising the point (there is always a lot of controversy every time support is dropped for older hardware).  That said, I do think "the needs of the many" should generally be paramount, especially when you consider how much change has occurred in the base system and to Tcl itself, on which MacPorts relies heavily, across the last 3 major MacOSX releases.

Specifically, it may be comparatively easy to get macports itself to compile on Tiger, and it may even be easy to get several hundred of the most popular ports working, but where do you draw the line after that?  How many people (in the maintainers group) even still have G4/Tiger hardware to test on and what sorts of statements can be made about what percentage of the MacPorts "ports collection" works on SnowLeopard, Leopard and Tiger?  Probably none, since that kind of exhaustive testing has always been conspicuously absent for even the latest releases of MacOSX and MacPorts, but it seems somewhat less than fair to either the maintainers or the users of MacPorts to have Tiger users assume anything at all about the state of support, and if they can't assume anything, then where's the value?  Perhaps I simply like my world painted in clearer shades of black and white than most, or perhaps I simply no longer have the kind of room for older hardware that the rest of you do. :-)

- Jordan

P.S. OK, I'll confess that I still have a DEC Alpha in the corner, running at a whopping 500MHz, but it hasn't been powered up for over 5 years.  Anyone looking for a doorstop?  You pay shipping and its yours. :)
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