Re: [gtk-osx-users] Support for ancient MacOS versions?

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Jan 13, 2017, at 1:57 AM, Gabriele Greco <gabrielegreco gmail com> wrote:

A post yesterday from someone actually trying to build Gtk on a Tiger system raises a question I've been mulling for some time:

Is it time to pull the plug on the older versions of MacOS?

Tiger is ancient, at least in OSX relase pace, recently chrome dropped also 10.8... 

Build for ancient OSX is really hard on recent machines, if you use XCode 8 you can build ONLY for 10.9+, and that's the target I use for the app I'm currently developing (a video converter), and for the opensource mud client that I wrote in the past that many OSX users like and use (http://ggmud.sourceforge.net).

Obviously building for 10.9+ I can also target only x86_64, and that is a further semplification of the development process.

In fact given today's security environment I think that supporting ancient and no-longer updated MacOS versions is a disservice to users, who might get the message that it's OK to expose their insecure systems to the internet because someone out there still supports their system.

Yeah, I agree with this too.

I think that your proposed 5 years support is more than enough.

It might be true that the Xcode8 GUI won't let you set a target older than 10.9, but the compiler will build code that runs on 10.6 if you tell it to with -macosx-version-min=10.6. Since the Xcode GUI is immaterial to this project, for our purposes the minimum possible is 10.6.

Note, however, that language features are dependent on macosx-version-min. I found the other day that if your code uses C++11 features from the standard library the minimum version that will compile is 10.9.

32-bit code builds and runs just fine. It's arguable that there's no point if one is targeting 10.7+, but that's different from "can't".

Regards,

John Ralls