OSX at PowerPC: Dropping support - why?

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Douglas Mencken <dougmencken at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> As I found, LibreOffice community suddenly ditched support for Mac OS X @
> PowerPC since version 4.1.0.

On top of what cloph already explained, I would add that this was not 'sudden'
The release note of 4.0 already warned that 10.4/10/5 SDK and hence
PPC where 'deprecated'
which means.. will be dropped soon, likely at the next version.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Feature_removal_.2F_deprecation
"Deprecated Mac / PPC as a platform, raising our base-line to 10.6."

it was added in the release note of 4.0 at that point:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/index.php?title=ReleaseNotes/4.0&oldid=59392

that is 11th of December 2012... more than 8 months before 4.1
release... hardly 'sudden'

> Specifically, it has been done with the
> following two commits by plain removal of code:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=7aa6f1b01481c1d0f1a12f56ad197c797056c37b
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=d8842c2221cb5e6ea958381f9dcd76d9bb9bbafc

Actually that was already effectively broken before that, due to the
introduction of OS feature/api that were not backward compatible with
10.4/10.5.
The commit you indicate are just the one that makes it clear and
official.. but the tree before these commit where already not
buildable on ppc.


But as Cloph said: if you have the hardware and the time to dedicate
to the task... your welcome to maintain backward compat with 10.4...
we will even gladly take the patches, as long as it does not break, or
put undue requirements to,  the other platforms supported.


PS: if it has not been for cloph perseverance and dedication, the PPC
platform would have been drop way earlier... prolly as soon as the 3.4
release. Bear in mind Apple timeline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processorshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors

Apple has not sold a PPC hardware in 7 years.
Apple dropped PPC support from their SDK 4 years ago.
Apple formally dropped support for any PPC software 2 years ago.

as the saying goes: you can't be more royalist than the king. (
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%AAtre_plus_royaliste_que_le_roi )

Norbert