Access to machines with old OS versions/architectures, like 10.4, 10.5, ... ppc

[Ryan Schmidt]

I have old PowerPC machines that I use for this purpose. The problem is not hardware; additional PowerPC machines can be acquired if they are useful to anyone. The problem is getting developers (both upstream and within MacPorts) to fix problems on these old systems.

I may be able to provide access to such systems, if that would be useful; my concern would just be with security. The first probably insecure idea is to give interested developers ssh accounts with sudoer permission to run the port command. Alternately, giving each user a restricted account and a private copy of MacPorts would be more secure, but take more disk space, though that's probably acceptable.

Daniel is correct that we should be encouraging users to upgrade to OS X versions that receive security updates from Apple. However, some old machines (e.g. PowerPC) machines cannot run newer versions. When the alternative is to throw out an otherwise working computer, I would rather that old computer continue to be usefully employed than taking up space in a landfill.

Giving developers having older Macs access to newer systems is a less pressing need, in my opinion. The problem will fix itself when such developers eventually upgrade to newer hardware. And we have buildbots to discover problems on such systems. Also, according to the WWDC2014 keynote, fully half of Mac users are running Mavericks. So if a port you maintain has a problem only on Mavericks, chances are if you write to the macports-dev mailing list, another developer will be able to help take a look at the problem.