Supported configurations once Mavericks is released

[Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia]

I would like to open a discussion about what configurations we intend to list as supported with the release of Mavericks.  Currently, our webpage states:
"""
We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” Vs. “unstable” branches, targeting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.8, A.K.A. Mountain Lion) and the immediately previous two (10.7, A.K.A. Lion and 10.6, A.K.A. Snow Leopard).
"""

This is more a reflection of the maintainer base than it is a MacPorts policy, with older OS versions falling out of support due to lack of users and maintainers.

The reality is that Snow Leopard remains a popular release.  Many factors including rosetta support keep users on this old OS, and I'm not sure we want to "drop" support for SL with the release of Mavericks.  We do, however, want to limit the number of configurations that we support in this world of more rapid OS release cycles.

I suggest that we advertise a tiered support level breaking things down by OS version and architecture.  Specifically:

Tier 1 (Primary support platforms):
10.9.x / x86_64 (plus i386 for ports that don't support x86_64)
10.8.x / x86_64 (plus i386 for ports that don't support x86_64)
10.7.x / x86_64 (plus i386 for ports that don't support x86_64)
10.6.x / x86_64 (plus i386 for ports that don't support x86_64)

Tier 2 (Will try hard not to break):
10.9.x / i386
10.8.x / i386
10.7.x / i386
10.6.x / i386

Tier 3 (YMMV.  Expect to do a lot of the legwork if you want to get a fix):
10.6.x / ppc (Rosetta)
10.5.x / x86_64
10.5.x / i386
10.5.x / ppc
10.4.x / i386
10.4.x / ppc

This allows us to push ppc out to "YMMV-land" (where it currently is in practice) while also keeping 10.6 available as a primary support platform.

Additionally, 32bit intel machines (some of the first gen Intel Macs from 2006) would no longer be "tier 1" supported, but they'll still be a rung above ppc machines.

Thoughts?

--Jeremy

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