Support for Mac OSX 10.5

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Tue Feb 25 12:52:38 EST 2014


On 25/02/14 18:18, Benjamin Beaumont wrote:
> Dear List Members,
>
> As many of you will know, we have been overhauling the LiveCode engine for
> the last 12 months or so. For those of you who are watching the LiveCode
> Github repository, you'll notice that:
>
> - LiveCode 7 (Unicode) is nearing a workable engine.
> - LiveCode 6.7 (Cocoa) is nearing a workable engine.
>
> As we approach a DP we have a decision to make in regards to our continuing
> support for older platforms, in particular, Mac OSX 10.5. LiveCode 6.7
> requires considerable additional development resource to enable us to
> continue supporting Mac OSX 10.5. The cocoa port is all but complete for
> MacOS 10.6 and above. Our current plan is to put out a DP of LiveCode 6.7
> as soon on the final elements are running and then return to round out Mac
> OSX 10.5 support in subsequent DPs. LiveCode 7.0 has also required us to
> spend considerable amounts of time ensuring compatibility with 10.5 and has
> complicated our build process. As the 7.0 project matures, we'll have to
> continue investing development resource to ensure that Mac OSX 10.5 is
> fully support, above and beyond the resources used to support 10.6 and
> above.
>
> So we'd like to consult the community to gauge whether now is the
> appropriate time to cease our support for Mac OS X 10.5. It would mean that
> LiveCode 6.6 would be the final Mac OSX 10.5 compatible version. We're keen
> to get the right balance between investing our development resources in
> progress and platform support.
>
> Are there compelling reasons to support MacOS X 10.5 in LiveCode 6.7 and
> above? If so, we'd love to hear them.
>
> Also, if we don't drop support at this point, when would it be appropriate
> for us to do so?
>
> Below is our list of concerns and also reasons we feel it benefits our team
> and the community to drop support at this time.
>
> Concerns
> MacOS 10.5 is the final version to support PowerPC. As a result, owners of
> PowerPC based Macs would not be able to use LiveCode 6.7 or above. However,
> only 3.8% of Mac desktop computers are running MacOS X 10.5 according to
> netmarketshare.com:
>
> http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Mac+OS+X+10.5&qpcustomb=0
>
> Users of LiveCode would be able to continue supporting their PowerPC
> customers by building with LiveCode 6.6, but as a result would have to
> start shipping two mac installers.
>
> Pros
> Dropping support has the following advantages for the LiveCode team and the
> community:
>
>     1. We spend less time back porting the 10.6 cocoa implementation to
>     support 10.5 (10.5's Cocoa APIs are less mature than 10.6's and it isn't
>     possible to completely eliminate Carbon usage for a 10.5 port). We estimate
>     it will take 3-4 weeks to get the core engine working on 10.5. This saving
>     also applies to all future projects.
>     2. We spend less time getting new developments to build and run under
>     10.5. For example, the new libraries to support unicode took a considerable
>     investment of engineering resource to compile for 10.5.
>     3. We can use newer compilers on Mac that have improved optimisation
>     features, the result being a faster LiveCode engine.
>     4. Implementing desktop features for Mac becomes simpler (and as a
>     result quicker) with the API's being relatively consistent from 10.6-10.9.
>     This enables us to deliver features faster. The remainder of the stretch
>     goals for the kickstarter project are 'feature' implementations. Supporting
>     10.5 requires us to implement the features for more than one API, in many
>     cases doubling the amount of work we have to do.
>     5. Building and feature additions become easier for open-source
>     contributors.
>
> Thanks for reading up to this point. We appreciate your feedback as it will
> help us in our decision making process.
>
> Warm regards,
>
> Ben
>
> _____________________________________________
>

As "King of Retro" I would like to say 'keep Mac OS 10.5', but realise 
that, frankly, that the work involved
in not justified: so drop it.

BUT . . . Please continue to make LIvecode 6.5 and 6.6 commercial 
licenses avaialble who feel compelled to build for Mac PPC computers.

Richmond.




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