Mojave and Macports

[Bill Cole]

On 2022-01-13 at 16:26:01 UTC-0500 (Thu, 13 Jan 2022 15:26:01 -0600)
Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com>
is rumored to have said:
[...]
>
> My question for y'all goes like this - How long will macports continue 
> to "work" on Mojave?

No one can actually give a fixed date for that which you could 
reasonably rely upon.

MacPorts still has support for Tiger. That's 10 releases older than 
Mojave. It is unlikely that the aggregate 'vision' of the people doing 
the work of keeping MP going will change so much as to drop Mojave 
before it is simply impossible to continue to support it. If I recall 
correctly, dropping Panther only happened because the last 
Panther-capable machine available to the project died. Speaking only as 
a long-time user and observer of MacPorts, I would be surprised if 
Mojave support went away in this decade.

With that said, "support" in MacPorts' core is not the only thing to be 
concerned with. One thing I found running Snow Leopard until last 
February on a 32bit-only CoreDuo was that support in ports I was using 
or tried to use was slowly crumbling over time, often beyond anything 
MacPorts could work around. The biggest headaches weren't even rooted in 
hardware or OS version per se, but in the toolchain (gcc/clang/etc.) and 
runtime (libgcc/libcxx/etc.) evolution. Re-bootstrapping my whole 
MacPorts world never became impossible, but by the end it was a 
multi-day festivity involving building multiple toolchains and learning 
obscure command-line options for port. It may never become impossible 
for to keep using MacPorts on Mojave, but it may end up taking so much 
babysitting that you'd rather not. I hope that's a long time, because my 
personal machines are staying there for some time as well.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire