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

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jun 8, 2014, at 3:54 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I would recommend that people who intend to make use of older hardware should do so with OSes that continue to get security updates (and/or should make sure those older machines aren't connected to a network where they can do damage to other machines/networks).

> 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.

It was nice back in the opendarwin days to have a shell account on machines with the two most recent releases of Mac OS X (or their opendarwin equivalents).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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