OSX at PowerPC: Dropping support - why?

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Douglas, *,

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Douglas Mencken <dougmencken at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As I found, LibreOffice community suddenly ditched support for Mac OS X @
> PowerPC since version 4.1.0. Specifically, it has been done with the
> following two commits by plain removal of code:

The decision is not about dropping PPC - that is just a side-effect.
The decision is to officially drop support for Mac OSX 10.5 and older.
Dropping PPC is just a consequence of this, since there is no newer
version of Mac OSX for PPC.

Well, not really - it was decided quite a while ago to drop support
for PPC, to be able to raise the baseline, get rid of the old
toolchain.

The official drop of PPC support (for me at least) was the build
requirement of a newer version of "touch" than the one that comes with
Mac OSX / Xcode for 10.4/5.

> Can you please explain, why is it needed to drop? How does such removal help
> LibreOffice?

It helps not having to care about old systems when implementing stuff
that depends on the newer OS technologies. If you'd want to continue
supporting 10.4/10.5, you would have to do twice the work. One time
using the new OS features, and another time doing it for the old OS.
This complicates the code, and given that there are very few macosx
developers, this just isn't worth the effort.

Fewer and fewer users use Mac OSX on their PPC.

So the benefit is: Developers can focus on the actual features,
without having to care about backwards-compatibility to a system they
don't even have access to.

> Can you please tell, which new features / bug fixes are
> impossible to implement due to presence of lines you removed? Why is
> removing OS X @ PowerPC important? Why such awful decision has been made?

See above. The decision is to drop support for 10.4/10.5 - PPC just is
Apple's victim. Ask Apple why they don't support PPC anymore. Why
current versions of Mac OSX are only available for Intel. Ask Apple
why they don't offer software-updates for 10.5 any longer.

> Where can I read any related discussion about this decision?

In the old ESC minutes for example, and on the wiki page that was
started way back for such kind of stuff
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice4

That 4.0.x is still available for PPC is basically an additional
bonus... (since nothing needing new OS features was added)

Having said all that: it is opensource after all. If there is a group
of Mac developers who want to maintain a PPC port nevertheless, they
are welcome to join the project and revive the port (but that port
would diverge more and more from the Mac/Intel version in future)

ciao
Christian