Installing gcc6 on a PPC Mac Mini 10.4 gives me hell

[Andreas Falkenhahn]

On 20.03.2018 at 23:59 Chris Jones wrote:

> You can call these OSes ‘retro’ if you want, to make it sound good,
> but all they really are, are outdated and insecure.

By the way, another reason to use "outdated and insecure" operating
systems from a programmer's point of view is backwards compatibility.
Of course, the latest Xcode versions allow you to target older Mac OS
versions with just a mouse click but this stuff is often hardly tested
and I've seen the strangest things happen when building for 10.6 on
10.13 let's say.

Upwards compatibility, however, is a completely different case
because there are lots of binaries compiled on 10.6 or even older
versions around and Apple usually tries hard to keep binary
compatibility. They even support real ancient stuff like QuickDraw
in binaries which have long been removed from the SDKs.

So it's a much better idea to keep older versions of the operating
system and build on these than trying to build for older versions on
newer versions.

It's also worth mentioning that APIs declared obsolete are often
quickly removed from the SDK. So the only chance to be able to
use APIs declared obsolete often is to keep your old installation.

-- 
Best regards,
 Andreas Falkenhahn                            mailto:andreas at falkenhahn.com