RFC: Drop PPC support

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Oct 1, 2014, at 1:58 PM, Sean Farley <sean at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> As discussed in the MPI thread, PPC is very old and is causing quite the
> development burden. I would be in favor of discussing how much effort we
> really want to spend supporting them (similar to supporting libstdc++ on
> Mavericks).
> 
> We could tag some known version of the MacPorts svn tree for PPC users
> and be done with it. This would allow us to concentrate on other issues.
> 
> We could also talk about how far of an OS back do we really want to
> support. Tiger and Leopard are decrepit. We don't even have buildbots
> for PPC nor OSes below Lion.
> 
> Should we finally drop some of this older stuff?
> 
> Comments welcomed.

Historically we officially support the current and previous Mac OS X release (while not doing anything to on-purpose break older releases / being willing to accept patches to make things work on older releases).

I think that's a reasonable policy.

We have made some effort to support PPC machines for a while longer than that, which was nice, but we probably shouldn't be doing anymore.

I don't think we should provide installers/builds for anything other than the supported Mac OS X releases - and I also think we should make sure we're only supporting OS releases that are currently getting security updates from upstream...

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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