+1 Sent from my iPhone Encrypted email at jgpfers...@protonmail.com
> On Mar 7, 2018, at 07:14, stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Dear Marcus, > > thanks for the detailed answer. > > Let me say that my question did not in any ways imply that Pharo should > assume the burden of maintaining current images and VMs on old machines. My > goal was (is) simply to find out whether it was possible to repurpose a > number old machines I have laying around by installing *old* versions of > Pharo. And I now have a positive answer, having installed vm30 and verified > that it works perfectly. > > In fact, I think adding a few lines to the website listing the last supported > version for the major MacOs releases would be a valuable addition and nicely > complement your commendable policy of keeping everything. > > All the best, > > Stefano > > >> On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 1:47 AM, Marcus Denker <marcus.den...@inria.fr> wrote: >> >> >>> On 5 Mar 2018, at 20:16, stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 11:28 AM, Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.s...@gmail.com> >>> wrote: >>>> Did you check >>>> >>>> http://get.pharo.org >>>> >>>> because we keep everything. >>>> >>> >>> >>> Apologies for not having stated my question more precisely. Indeed, I >>> started from get.pharo.org, but the zeroconf script did not guess right. >>> The app it downloaded crashes at startup. Then I saw the *long* list of >>> versions available and had no idea where to begin. So my real question is: >>> >>> Does anyone know which among the many VMs available on >>> http://get.pharo.org would work on a MacOs Powerbook Pro running 10.6.9? It >>> was the latest 32 bit only machine Apple made, based on the Intel Core Duo >>> (NOT the Intel Core 2 Duo that came out a few months later). >>> >> you could look for old VMs and downloads here: http://files.pharo.org/ >> >> But it is quite hard to for us (with our limited man power) to support old >> machines forever… e.g the vm from that time should run, >> but at some point the VM gets improved and newer images require a newer VM >> as we want to actually use the features that >> new VMs provide. >> >> Keeping everything compatible in all possible directions (old images on new >> VMs, new image on old VMs …) puts quite some >> constraints on what you can do in future… an maintaining new VMs for all >> possible old MacOS versions could soon just >> use up all our manpower. >> >> So this is not a simple problem to solve. Even very financially capable >> projects (like Mozilla) can not support old MacOS >> versions. And they spend 150K per *month* just on CI infrastructure… imagine >> if they decide to not support anything older >> then MaOS 10.9… can we? should we? >> >> There are things to do on this front, but if I would spend effort the first >> thing I would work on is running *old* images on >> *new* VMs and explore what kind of abstraction would be needed to to that >> nicely and in a way that it can be maintained >> and in a way that all the needed code ( e.g. translation byte code from old >> to new) would be not part of the VM but >> part of the image. >> >> Making sure to run *current* images on old Machines can only be done by >> backporting the current VM to the old OS. >> This should be not that hard, worst case is that you need to combine some >> old OS related code with the rest of the new VM, >> but that should not be much. >> >> But one question: Considering what developer time costs… I am quite sure >> that it is cheaper to just buy a current Mac. >> >> Marcus >> > > > > -- > __________________________________________________ > Stefano Franchi > > stefano.fran...@gmail.com > http://stefano.cleinias.org
