Time to say goodbye to Tiger?

[raf]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 05:15:46AM +1100, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
> It's had a good run, but it's long been getting harder and harder to
> support. Upstream projects are understandably reluctant to add fixes for it.
> The very few users who open Trac tickets for Tiger issues are opening them
> considerably faster than they can be fixed. Maybe it's time to call it
> quits.
> 
> 10.4 is of course already unsupported in the sense that we have no
> expectation that maintainers should fix any problems on OS versions older
> than current-2. So practically speaking, this would mean removing all
> workarounds for 10.4 from base in the next major MacPorts release, closing
> all 10.4 specific tickets as "wontfix", and beginning the process of
> removing workarounds for 10.4 from ports as they are updated.
> 
> What does everyone think?
> 
> - Josh

Even if it's getting harder to support, I think it would be sad to undo the
work that got ports working on 10.4 since the work has been done and it worked.
I can't get ripgrep to install on 10.4 because cargo fails to build
(maybe on 10.6 as well), but other things work, and that's fantastic.

Admittedly, I only use my 10.4 PowerBook G4 for testing. It was suggested to
me once that perhaps the only people using 10.4 and macports are testing ports
that maybe nobody really needs. I don't know. It looks like there are no
mpstats for 10.4, so it's hard to tell, but this looks like people are still
using it (a year ago):

  What's the current state of MacPorts on Tiger?
  https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/whats-the-current-state-of-macports-on-tiger.2417693/

I would hate to see macports start to have a changing window of support.
The Homebrew policy makes it completely useless for me. Macports' heroic
support for old systems is amazing. I need 10.6 to run some PPC apps that
have no substitute. I need 10.14 to run a 32-bit app that has no substitute.
And I need intel for running virtual machines for operating systems that
have no arm support. So I can only run macOS systems that Apple and Homebrew
consider obsolete. It's great having macports to make these systems work well.

Loss of support for 10.4 wouldn't hurt me personally (although the G4 has the
best keyboard I've ever used), but if it ever lead to the loss of support for
10.6, or 10.14, that would be terrible for me.

Thanks for all the great work.

cheers,
raf