Time to say goodbye to Tiger?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Ryan,


Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2025, at 18:25, Gagan Sidhu wrote:
>
> Gagan, I'm pretty close to permanently banning you from this project. Ken is a valued contributor and doesn't deserve your insults. MacPorts is a community where people volunteer their time to make things better for other Mac users, ostensibly because they enjoy doing so. If the community devolves into personal attacks, that enjoyment evaporates, contributors disappear, and the project dies.

Thank you for those diplomatic words.
I was a little bit shocked by reading Gagan's words.. somehow his 
replies split off the main thread and read them out-of-order.

We were discussing plus and contra of dropping supports, but no need for 
attacks.
Josh and Ken are in different areas both precious contributors to MacPorts.
MacPorts itself is a very valuable project. It helps actually older Macs 
to remain usable and it helps old and new macs t get closer to open 
source! Something very positive, where Apple used to be closer 20 years 
ago but nowadays slipped away. Modern Macs feel like an iPad with a 
keyboard, MacPorts turns them in computers again... the value is amazing.

Without it, I couldn't work e.g. ArcticFox and perhaps TenFourFox would 
have existed.
Same goes for Emacs or even Gimp, so much better to install it from MP.
>
> Maybe we should all take a couple days off from this thread to cool down and if there's anything to be said when we return let's keep it civil and fact-based. One fact I can share is that a disproportionately high number of tickets in recent months or maybe years have been filed by users of the oldest Mac OS X versions MacPorts works on and while some of those issues are general and need general fixes, many are specific to those old systems and responding to such tickets takes time that could have been spent fixing problems that affect a much larger portion of the MacPorts-using population. This may be one reason why Josh suggested dropping Tiger support.

Agreed.. I can understand the frustration... there are also a lot of 
duplicates. Latest compiler upgrade helped a lot on 10.5 and 10.6 though 
in terms of buildability!

MacPorts has the assumption to be "the same" on all systems... this was 
easier back then, but nowadays we span many operating systems, different 
compilers and PPC 32bit & 64bit, Intel 32bit & 64bit, ARM64 !  Apple 
compiler, GCC and clang! That's a lot.

maybe the idea of a "core system" and extra packages could make sense, 
also in terms of expectations for users. Like "works", "somehow works, 
workarounds, limited" and "known to fail".

Riccardo