Re: 10.5 Intel - for me, that platform is just a vehicle to 10.5 PPC. I use it for cross compiling for 10.5 PPC. All these intel machines can be upgraded to at least 10.7 (10.6 if you want Rosetta). Snow Leopard DVDs on eBay are $15 if you don't have one (I have six or so from various Apple Dev and other purchases over the past 20 years). So there might not be a lot of point to expending a great deal of effort porting to 10.5 Intel, unless it leads to 10.5 PPC. Am I missing something?
10.5 PPC is where I'm having some fun trying to get things working. It's a good challenge. gcc6 works great there for compiling cxx11 against libgcc, but falls down compiling newer things against the Apple SDKs. I have clang-3.6 / llvm-3.6 working, but the code bus errors and crashes and seems unreliable. I have llvm-3.8 built cleanly ( I believe ) on PPC using gcc6 to build it - gcc6 puts out reliable ppc code, so hopefully that might work better than some previous versions of llvm - but so far, I can't build clang-3.8 with anything on ppc. This might be something that could be overcome. Even then, I don't know if this llvm-3.8 ppc code will be reliable - probably not very. Is there any way to steer clang-3.6 output into llvm-3.8 for compiling? the llvm group has stated they are dropping ppc support (there is a thread about that recently). So I don't know if clang/llvm will ever exist for 10.5 ppc in a fashion that outputs reliablle reliable code. Jeremy is in the inner circles on this. Many bugs are indicated a NTBF. So it looks like gcc6 (or maybe 7 and beyond) and apple-gcc-4.2 are probably going to be the end of the road for PPC. Still -- a good run. Just for fun, I started a build of octave using gcc6 on 10.5 PPC just now. Will see how far it gets... Anyway, point of all this is that I'm extremely impressed with the way the macports devs and Jeremy have enabled libc++ / modern llvm-clang on 10.6 and 10.7, and would hate to see us move very far away from that or overly confuse the issue. The current situation is just fantastic for 10.6/10.7, and uses largely the same portfile structure as 10.9+, minimizing hassles for port authors.
