On Jan 9, 2024 at 03:37 +0800, Joshua Root <j...@macports.org>, wrote: > On 9/1/2024 05:26, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > On 1/8/24 12:50, Sergey Fedorov wrote: > > > 2. Standard 10.6.8 release from Apple does support building and > > > running ppc binaries via Rosetta. > > > > Why would one want to spend time and effort on doing that, though? > > You wouldn't, if you were running a public release of 10.6. The ppc libs > were put there to support existing ppc binaries, which will have been > built targeting 10.5 or older. With MacPorts, native x86_64 or i386 > builds would be far preferable. Unless, of course, you're running on a > CPU that can't run those archs, which can only be the case if you are > running an early development version of the OS.
Yet gcc supports 10.6.8 Rosetta in the master. Current gcc. (And no, it is not me who brought it there.) > > So far as I can tell, the project's primary goal is to provide support > > for the millions of people who run MacOS on current hardware and > > operating systems and want up to date software for their machine. The > > goal is not (primarily) to assist in running PPC binaries on Rosetta on > > 20 year old hardware for the couple of people for whom that is > > interesting. Certainly there's nothing wrong with supporting that to the > > extent that it does not interfere with the primary goal. > > As a reminder, the project policy is (and has been virtually since the > beginning) to support the versions of macOS that are still getting > updates from Apple. That is the expectation for maintainers. Maintainers > can voluntarily support older stuff, but they are under no obligation to > so so. There is no obligation, obviously, no one claims there is, I believe. As for the policy, I can see that Macports offers distributives for older OS which do not get updates from Apple for years. This is much more than not prohibiting such builds. I did not dig through the whole of documentation, but I believe that if an installable binary for the specific OS is provided, there is an implication it should actually work. There is also no obligation to break something which a maintainer is not personally interested in.
