Time to say goodbye to Tiger?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Fred Wright wrote:
>
> I'm never a fan of dropping something just because it's "old". You're 
> not very specific about "workarounds for 10.4" in base, but if any 
> code specifically related to *any* OS version isn't well-segregated, 
> then that's a bad design.  And aside from base, what you're proposing 
> boils down to *prohibiting* maintainers from supporting 10.4, which is 
> rather heavy-handed.

Agree with you.

>
> I've made 10.4-related fixes to a number of ports myself, and they 
> usually haven't been hard.  Most of the issues fall into the "can't be 
> bothered" category rather than the "this is hard to fix" category.
>
> Although dropping 10.4 isn't a "hard drop" of any hardware besides the 
> G3, a number of programs run noticeably faster under 10.4 than under 
> 10.5 (and I don't just mean the GUI).  I suspect that 10.5 involved a 
> "POSIX compliance by any means necessary" mandate, without regard to 
> performance impact.  Also, when I "upgraded" my (CPU-upgraded) 
> Quicksilver from 10.4 to 10.5, it became significantly less stable.  
> Apple weasels out of this by calling all machines with CPU upgrades 
> unsupported, but the 7457 upgrade was quite valuable.
>
> In legacy-support, there's only one feature I can think of (and a 
> fairly new one at that) that doesn't work on 10.4.  There are a couple 
> where the 10.4 version is deficient, though not necessarily in a 
> show-stopping manner.  Everything else works just as well on 10.4 as 
> it does on 10.5+, and anything using those features via legacy-support 
> doesn't need to worry about it.

Indeed, 10.4 was quite fast on PPC. On Intel I used it little
I have two similar MacBooks, one with 10.5 and one with 10.6, sometimes 
the 10.5 is more sluggish.. there are a lot of more warnings in console. 
I really think it is bug ridden. Not in everything, but it feels in 
general usage.

>
> There used to be some nontrivial extra code in legacy-support for 
> 10.4, but I got rid of almost all of it just by organizing the code 
> better.
Wonderful!

>
> I don't actually *use* 10.4 for anything myself, but I do support it 
> and test it, just for the benefit of people who do.  When the 
> PowerBook that I used to use for PPC testing died, I spent my own 
> money on a used G4 Mini, as well as upgrading its HDD so that I could 
> comfortably dual-boot 10.4 and 10.5 for MacPorts testing.
>

Thank you for your positive attitude. Sometimes I noticed certain 10.4 
bugs come up in 10.5 too where I have i386 and amd64 to work with.

How is a VirtualBox i386 system with 10.4 Intel on a newer MacBook?
> One positive aspect of supporting anything old is that one doesn't 
> have to worry about fixes colliding with updates. :-) Usually, once 
> something is fixed, it stays fixed.  Except of course when someone 
> decides to inflict a new compiler on it when the old one was working 
> fine.

Compiler was a tough choice indeed. But on 10.5 it smoothed out quite well.

Riccardo