What should a port do if 10.4 is not supported any more?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 29, 2012, at 08:50, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:

>> I was playing with wxWidgets 2.9 a bit. It builds fine without 10.6
>> (QuickDraw has been removed recently), so I guess that there should
>> not be any issues on Mountain Lion any more, but on the other hand I
>> noticed that those changes don't support Tiger any more, so 2.9.4
>> (whenever it's going to be released) won't build/work on 10.4.
>> 
>> I wanted to submit a patch on trac which enables building with clang
>> and wanted to add a few patches to remove dependency on 10.6 SDK along
>> the way, but that second part (removing dependency on 10.6) means
>> dropping support for 10.4.
>> 
>> What is the general strategy for handling such situations in MacPorts?
>> I guess that other developers might reject my patch if it drops
>> support for 10.4, but with wxWidgets 2.9.4 on the way that is bound to
>> happen anyway, so it might make more sense to think about it earlier.
> 
> If the maintainer wants to continue to support a legacy platform for their port, that's entirely up to them. Just keep in mind some platforms may not be capable of using the current version of MacPorts, so you might need to adjust your portfiles to test if they can use any of MacPorts new features before running some commands.

Use of the current ports tree assumes use of the current version of MacPorts. We don't support use of earlier versions of MacPorts.

MacPorts 2.1.1 still works fine on Tiger and up.

If a port doesn't support Tiger, it should so indicate with a pre-fetch error message. Examples of ports that do this include csu and nodejs.