Build for Classic

Joe Lewis Wilkins pepetoo at cox.net
Sat May 19 19:15:58 EDT 2007


Thank you, Robert. You've got the essence, which I feel can be  
summarized with a single word: "predictability".

Joe Wilkins

On May 19, 2007, at 3:57 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:

> 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 maintaining a separate set of outdated headers, some of which may  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




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