Build for Classic

[Robert Brenstein]

>But think about it:  Even if they gave us a Classic engine today, 
>the feature parity would be short-lived.  Soon after there would be 
>a new version of Rev, and we all understand they can't support 
>forever an OS Apple themselves abandoned long ago.

Richard, Chipp, Paul, and others

Those tirades for uselessness of OS9 and its support are missing the 
point. Nobody is arguing that effort in producing OS9 version could 
not be used "better", although whatever RR does, somebody won't be 
happy. It is a business decision of RR what they do.

Let me just remind that what started this thread was an innocent 
inquiry whether we can expect 2.8.1 for OS9 since 2.7 was "promised" 
but never materialized. This is along the same lines as the other 
thread discussing RR starting public beta for 2.7.5 but releasing 2.8 
and 2.8.1 instead. Inquiring minds want to know about OS9, but 
obviously this is a wrong forum to ask this, and thus this whole 
discussion is waste of time and electrons.

>I believe he's right:  AFAIK, there's no compiler which will let you 
>build for both Intel Macs and Classic.  All modern compilers have 
>abandoned Classic.  This would mean that not only would building for 
>Classic require forking throughout the codebase, but would require 
>forking every element in their process, and maintaining a separate 
>set of outdated headers, some of which may be incompatible with 
>modern replacements and require additional forking.

I don't know how Rev is building different releases, so there is no 
point to speculate as to what is involved and what stalled them from 
releasing 2.7 build for OS9.

>And all to deliver 15 minutes of feature parity for people who can't 
>really use most v2.7 and 2.8's new features in Classic anyway.

To be honest, feature parity is not it. If something makes no sense 
for OS9, there is no reason to have it included. There is no and has 
never been full feature parity for all platforms anyway. However, 
considering a decent number of fairly old bugs being fixed in 2.8.1, 
I suspect that many of these are present in 2.6.1, so it may be 
prudent for RR to make 2.8.x the end of life for Rev for OS9.

>We're currently seven years past Apple's kill date for OS 9.  Apple 
>themselves no longer provides any patches for it, and haven't for 
>more than half a decade.

Microsoft does not provide upgrades for W98 anymore, so by the same 
measure, you should also advocate for RR to abandon supporting 
Windows versions prior to XP. W98 is more buggy than OS9 I dare say.

>Exactly how long do you feel it would be reasonable for a 
>third-party vendor to exceed Apple's commitment to the OS they 
>abandoned?

As I said earlier, if RR announced in due time that 2.6.1 was the 
last OS9 version, we could have lived with that. The only thing I 
would expect of them would be to retain a capability to release a 
OS9-specific fix should any critical bugs (yes, critical not just any 
bugs) need addressing later on. That simply requires keeping one 
computer that can produce 2.6.2 build for OS9 from the 2.6.1 codebase 
(or whatever the last OS9 release is).

Robert