Support for ancient machines and operating systems

[Perry E. Metzger]

The question is very simple. "Does anyone using MacPorts actually depend 
on the machines in question for their daily work". Not "could someone in 
theory do so". Not "is there a way that you could do such a thing if you 
really really wanted to". Does anyone *actually* do it.

My assumption is no, or possibly a very, very small number of people. 
You can buy a much newer and better machine for a pittance on eBay or 
the equivalent.

I will note, however, that there are a huge number of people who rely on 
Sonoma on Intel or ARM as their daily work machine.

Perry


On 1/8/24 13:17, Sergey Fedorov wrote:
> I do not particularly get the question. By “not using as a hobby 
> project” you mean using it commercially? Obviously, “the latest 
> software” condition restricts this to open-source.
>
> I can name at least a few areas where macOS PowerPC /can be/ used 
> either commercially or with the latest software but rather for 
> not-too-demanding academic applications. Obviously, even the best 
> machines from 2005 cannot compete speed-wise with the modern ones, so 
> if a commercial application is sensitive to processing speed (or 
> portability), PPC is not a reasonable option.
> There is nothing preventing one from using a PowerMac today for print 
> media design and prepress, commercially. But software won’t be the latest.
> There is nothing preventing from using a PowerMac for something like 
> econometric models in R. Perhaps not a very commercial stuff, but not 
> a hobby project either. Everything I did for Bayesian modelling on an 
> Intel Mac I can do on a PowerPC.
>
> What is the real stopper is portability. If someone would give me a 
> PowerBook with G5 quad or at least dual cpu, I could use it as the 
> to-go machine.
> Single G4 – no, thanks, that is only good for a hobby project.
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 11:45 PM Nicklas Larsson via macports-dev 
> <macports-dev at lists.macports.org> wrote:
>
>     Hi all!
>
>     I’m seriously curious: does anyone still today use a PPC machine
>     today as (1) main/only workstation with (2) necessary use of
>     latest software and (3) without using it as hobby project?
>
>     Best regards,
>     Nicklas
>
>
>
>     > On 8 Jan 2024, at 15:50, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com>
>     wrote:
>     >
>     > There's been a bit of tension recently because of a group of
>     people who are very interested in keeping MacPorts working on
>     PowerPC hardware, none of which has been made for the last 18
>     years or so.
>     >
>     > I'd like to float the idea that we create a fork of the MacPorts
>     repository that is devoted to operating systems and hardware that
>     is more than (say) a decade old, and that we allow the people who
>     are interested in maintaining that software to freely work on it.
>     It doesn't hurt the rest of us after all, and it absolves us of
>     the need to keep the main MacPorts repository complicated by
>     patches to support very old systems.
>     >
>     > This way, people interested in old systems can keep them
>     running, and their work doesn't take up time for the rest of us
>     and vice versa.
>     >
>     > Perry
>     >
>
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