[OT] Multiple macOS recommendation sought

[Richmond]

That involves quite a capital outlay, and as long as you can justify 
that in terms of business and
remuneration, super.

I am not so set up, either business wise or in any other way.

What I DO know is that the "Mac world" post MacOS 9 seems to fracture 
along several lines:

PPC (probably not worth bothering on that any more) . . . 10.5

Intel 32-bit only (probably not worth bothering on that any more) . . . 
10.6.8

Intel Pre-10.9

10.9 - 10.14

Post 10.14

I would tend to concentrate on the last 2 sections: so you really only 
need 2 machines.

On 27.10.21 3:37, Phil Davis via use-livecode wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> Several years ago - 6-8-10 years ago? Not sure when - I left VMs 
> behind in favor of minimally-configured actual hardware. I have a 
> couple of Windows laptops but almost never use them now. My main 
> development world consists of 4 Mac minis of various ages (all Intel 
> or M1) and a couple of 2015 MBP laptops (and 2 iPads). Each machine 
> has an external drive used by Time Machine, so I can restore my work 
> as needed. I use Screen Sharing to manage things on multiple computers 
> from a single keyboard/display/mouse and it works great for my 
> purposes. I confess, I don't normally reinstall the OSes except for 
> upgrades to the next version if needed (e.g. High Sierra to Mojave); I 
> just keep them current with Apple updates and have never had a dev 
> issue that damaged the OS.
>
> Obviously my setup doesn't cover every macOS version, but my selected 
> hardware+OS combos have been very adequate for my needs. And for me, 
> it helps to have a LAN whose physical and conceptual topologies are 
> the same. It helps clarify problem sources in a client/server system I 
> maintain.
>
> Hope this helps -
> Phil Davis
>
>
> On 10/26/21 2:08 PM, Paul Dupuis via use-livecode wrote:
>> A problem I have struggled with for decades is software testing on 
>> the various versions of operating systems our software deploys on.
>>
>> For testing on Windows, we use Virtualbox with Virtual Machines (VMs) 
>> for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 (we have yet to try to 
>> build a Windows 11 VM)
>>
>> For macOS we have tried a multi-boot system, a mac Mini with hard 
>> disks partitions to boot to OSX 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, and 
>> 10.14 (Mojave). We tried a partition for 10.15 Catalina, but were 
>> were already experience problems switching between boot partitions 
>> where the Mini would forget what Startup disk it should boot from. 
>> When we added Catalina, the problem became worse, trying to go from 
>> Catalina to an older OS on reboot or vice versa would fail.
>>
>> So we tried a Mojave (10.14) laptop with Virtualbox and build a 
>> Catalina VM. This worked well for Catalina testing. We like VMs for 
>> the ability to reset to a snapshot or to clone them. We added a Big 
>> Sur VM, but playing video does not work in the VM and Virtualbox's 
>> latest release has not fixed this and macOS VMs are not really 
>> supported, even on mac hardware. We just tried a Monterey VM and it 
>> is unstable. It will crash and reboot after a random amount of time.
>>
>> Some sort of virtual machine is very appealing because of the ability 
>> to restore the machine to a snapshot after testing or to clone it. If 
>> testing messes something up, you can always get back to a known state 
>> without rebuilding a computer.
>>
>> What have other people's experiences been? Does anyone have a more 
>> stable, easier solution?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-livecode mailing list
>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your 
>> subscription preferences:
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
>>
>