RFC: Drop PPC support

[Frank Schima]

On Oct 1, 2014, at 12:01 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:

> 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…

+1 

It’s long overdue that we drop support for legacy (not supported by Apple) systems. 


-Frank