[Libreoffice] Mac OS 10.4 Support

[Joseph Powers]

Just doing a little research and wanted to report my findings:

1. The last G3 Mac was sold in January 1999 - 12 years ago
2. The last G5 mac was sold in August 2006 - 5 years ago
2. Mac OS 10.5 was released in October 2007 - 4 years ago
3. The last security update for Mac OS 10.4 was September 2009 - 2 years ago
4. A lot of software developers are dropping Mac OS 10.4 support.
	a. VideoLAN - June 2009
	b. Firefox - February 2010 
	c. Adobe Flash - All PPC Macs in Jun 2011

Please note that all G4 & G5 PPC Macs can run 10.5; thus, 10.4 support is only needed for people who haven't  upgraded to 10.5 or for Macs older then 11 years. If people don't want to upgrade the OS or still haven't replaced their 12 year old computer, what are the odds that they will be upgrading to the latest version of LibreOffice?

I believe it's about time to drop 10.4 support in LibreOffice. The 3.4 release is quite good, so we can keep a versions of it around for those people who don't want to or can't upgrade their hardware/OS.

How hard would it be to change the build system for 3.5+ (master) to allow it to build for 10.5? (With the release of 10.7, Apple will most likely end support for 10.5; however, I have a G5 Mac and don't want to retire it yet… it's the wife's computer).

Most of this is because I'd like to Upgrade my box to 10.7 and the new version of xCode 4.1 (the Mac development suit) doesn't support 10.4. It also doesn't support PPC, so we'll still need to have a way to use the older xCode 3.2.6 for building the PPC binaries.

By dropping 10.4 the build system should be able to use xCode 3.2.6 or 4.1 interchangeably. 

If we don't drop 10.4 support, I'm not sure how long Apple is going to keep xCode 3.2.6 available for download. Once it disappears, we'll have to drop 10.4 support since all new developers won't be able to get a compiler suite; this will also mean the end of our ability to support PPC.

This post is mostly to get people thinking about the future of LibreOffice development. 

It would be nice to get consensus on when (i.e. which version) we should drop support of 10.4 in and also which version we should drop PPC support in general.

Joe P.

PS: I only upgraded to xCode 4.1 on a secondary drive. I'm going to only upgrade the main drive to Lion and leave xCode at 3.2.6 until we get decide to drop 10.4 support.