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

[Sergio Had]

On Jan 9, 2024 at 03:37 +0800, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org>, wrote:
> On 9/1/2024 05:26, Perry E. Metzger 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?
>
> You wouldn't, if you were running a public release of 10.6. The ppc libs
> were put there to support existing ppc binaries, which will have been
> built targeting 10.5 or older. With MacPorts, native x86_64 or i386
> builds would be far preferable. Unless, of course, you're running on a
> CPU that can't run those archs, which can only be the case if you are
> running an early development version of the OS.

Yet gcc supports 10.6.8 Rosetta in the master. Current gcc. (And no, it is not me who brought it there.)
> > 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.
>
> As a reminder, the project policy is (and has been virtually since the
> beginning) to support the versions of macOS that are still getting
> updates from Apple. That is the expectation for maintainers. Maintainers
> can voluntarily support older stuff, but they are under no obligation to
> so so.

There is no obligation, obviously, no one claims there is, I believe.

As for the policy, I can see that Macports offers distributives for older OS which do not get updates from Apple for years. This is much more than not prohibiting such builds. I did not dig through the whole of documentation, but I believe that if an installable binary for the specific OS is provided, there is an implication it should actually work.

There is also no obligation to break something which a maintainer is not personally interested in.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20240109/df376b7a/attachment.htm>