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

[Sergey Fedorov]

To begin with, it is not up to me to decide what Macports should or should
not do, it is not my project.

However solution, if you ask me, if not to dump some users, who may be few,
but interested to contribute (I think no one can honestly accuse me of
fixing only PowerPC stuff – well, Ken may, but commit history is public),
and not to give up on one major competitive advantage over Homebrew, but
rather optimize how committing is done.

Give commit access to others, and no one will need to waste time approving
commits.

For a note, I still think that PowerPC impact is overexaggerated, and
mostly because there are some members who just hate the stuff, so every
once in a while we get huge threads.
I did not count, of course, but I think PPC-exclusive commits are not
numerous, and when PPC fixes are done, they normally are done together with
fixes for Intel or together with updates, so they should not take more time
to merge.

There is also not much problem to maintain ppc-specific code: if it is
there at all, do not touch it, and it gonna work. PPC does not change much
nowadays ;)

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 2:26 AM Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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