On 08.08.2013 16:22, O.Felka wrote:
Am 08.08.2013 10:08, schrieb Herbert Duerr:
This is very true also in other areas. I suggest we drop support for OSX
10.4 and 10.5 for Apache OpenOffice 4.1.
There are some good points for the proposal:
- the latest update of OSX 10.4 was in 2007 and Apple dropped support
for it in May 2011
- the latest update of OSX 10.5 was in 2009 and Apple dropped support
for it in July 2012
- Mozilla stopped releasing for them after FireFox 16
- Google stopped releasing for them after Chrome 22
- Microsoft stopped releasing for them after MSO 2011
- Adobe stopped releasing for them in 2012
- Oracle only provides Java for OSX 10.6 and up
- Adium stopped releasing for them after Adium 1.4.5
- etc.
It sounds reasonable to drop these OSXs for AOO 4.1 and I would second
the proposal.
But it's not a good style to drop an OS within a minor update.
- we dropped support for OSX PPC with AOO 3.4
- Apple routinely drops support for older platforms in minor version
numbers of OSX
- Mozilla eliminated minor version numbers for functionality-changing
releases
- Google Chrome never released minor versions
Of course we could do the "Solaris trick" (calling Solaris 2.6 as
Solaris 6) or "Java trick" (calling JRE 1.7 as Java 7) and rename our
AOO 4.1 as AOO 41. FWFIW JRE 1.7 is the first version that doesn't
support OSX 10.4 or 10.5 either.
Regarding naming I'd prefer a naming scheme of "AOO 2013" better anyway.
This could also avoid version number races where coopetitors feel that
they are forced to one-up major release numbers even if their
functionality or UI changes are minor...
What are the big changes in AOO 4.1 compared to 4.0 that we can't
support these OSXs any longer?
Switching to an XCode4 development environment, switching to 64bit only
builds, supporting JRE 1.7 and replacing plenty of APIs that are long
deprecated with their modern counterparts makes development easier.
We should have done that for AOO 4.0.
We should have done much more for AOO 4.0: There are many untranslated
languages, there are many important platforms and there are document
formats that we don't support yet. There are many open bugs and a lot of
enhancements and features are not implemented, some are not even ready
to implement. But if we had waited until every one of these items was
resolved to perfection we wouldn't have had a release this year (or
next) though.
But with AOO 4.0 as it is even if we still have users of AOO 4.0 on OSX
Tiger (OSX 10.4) or Leopard (OSX 10.4) they have now a modern office
with the wonderful sidebar. They cannot get any Apple updates and they
cannot get a recent Java, a recenct FireFox, a recent Chrome or a recent
Opera. But we provided our latest and greatest offering with all its
wonderful enhancements and fixes. I don't think there is much reason to
complain.
Herbert
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