Mac OS X 10.3 support (was: Re: Installing python25 on OS X 10.3 failed)

[James Berry]

"Official" MacPorts policy has been that we support the two most  
recent versions of Mac OS. Which at the present means Tiger and  
Leopard. That doesn't mean that we'll go out of our way to break older  
versions, but that we don't promise we won't.

A particularly good example of why this is probably a good idea is the  
current situation where we'd like to add additional support for  
launchd and startupitems. Launchd wasn't available on Panther, and to  
add new support for launchd startupitems will likely mean that ports  
relying on the feature will gradually become inoperable on Panther,  
where it will be too hard to maintain compatibility using  
SystemStarter features. To continue supporting a the 3-year-old  
Panther OS would mean restricting support for the newer versions, or  
creating an overly-complicated implementation.

James

On Nov 22, 2007, at 6:16 AM, js wrote:

> Sadly, there's no way to figure out how many OS X 10.3 users exist.
> This number is probably the most important one to take into account
> deciding whether MacPorts should support OS X 10.3 or not.
> Assuming Apple supports OSs as long as there're fair amount of users,
> this might be a good idea to support MacPorts on OSs Apple  
> officially supports.
> (10.3 - 10.5?)
>
> Letting Apple decidess it might be a better
>
> On Nov 20, 2007 7:30 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 19, 2007, at 14:02, Weissmann Markus wrote:
>>
>>> 10.3 is not officially supported anymore*) and I do not even have
>>> access to a 10.3 box.
>>> I'll happily add any patch for 10.3 that does not conflict with
>>> 10.4 or 10.5 but I don't have a way of testing it.
>>>
>>>
>>> -Markus
>>>
>>> *) which doesn't mean anyone will break stuff on purpose
>>
>>
>> This is the first I've heard of 10.3 not being supported anymore.
>>
>> Historically MacPorts has supported the current Mac OS X release and
>> the previous one, and granted, 10.5 was just released. But a lot of
>> ports aren't working so great on Leopard right now [1]. If a decision
>> is made to drop 10.3 support, I would hope that we would wait until
>> the 10.5 bug reports stop bucketing in and we can honestly say that
>> the MacPorts experience on 10.5 is at least as good as it was on
>> 10.4. And we are currently far from that.
>>
>> Note that the new guide [2] does not seem to indicate what versions
>> of Mac OS X are supported. It should so indicate, fairly near the  
>> top.
>>
>> [1] http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/query?
>> status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&summary=%
>> 7Eleopard&order=priority
>>
>> [2] http://geeklair.net/new_macports_guide/
>>
>>
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