Support for unreleased beta apple operating systems (was Support for ancient machines and operating systems)

[Perry E. Metzger]

On 1/8/24 12:50, Sergey Fedorov wrote:
> 2. Standard 10.6.8 release from Apple does support building and 
> running ppc binaries via Rosetta.

Why would one want to spend time and effort on doing that, though?

Just to be clear about my position on almost everything here:

I don't mind people spending lots of time and effort making old things 
stay working provided it doesn't cost anyone else anything. However, 
there's a lot of stuff in our tree now devoted to patching modern 
software to make it work on certain old versions of MacOS. There's a 
cost to that in that other people have to think about it, read through 
Portfiles trying to assure themselves that they don't need to think 
about certain patches, etc. It adds complexity and time to the process 
of maintaining stuff that runs for most people.

So far as I can tell, the project's primary goal is to provide support 
for the millions of people who run MacOS on current hardware and 
operating systems and want up to date software for their machine. The 
goal is not (primarily) to assist in running PPC binaries on Rosetta on 
20 year old hardware for the couple of people for whom that is 
interesting. Certainly there's nothing wrong with supporting that to the 
extent that it does not interfere with the primary goal.

I worry that the interest of a small minority in their hobby of making 
certain very old and specific configurations work is taking time away 
from the rest of the project. Most of the people running on Macs use 
Sonoma with ARM or Intel hardware.

Perry