[OS X TeX] comments on 10.3 support
Adam R. Maxwell
amaxwell at mac.com
Sun Aug 20 16:50:29 CEST 2006
On Aug 20, 2006, at 00:10, Gerben Wierda wrote:
> On Aug 18, 2006, at 17:44 , Adam Maxwell wrote:
>
>> How many people are still using Panther (OS X 10.3) regularly?
>> Since we can no longer test/debug BibDesk on it, it's becoming
>> harder to maintain "support" with any degree of certainty that it
>> actually works. Dropping our notional support would allow us to
>> remove some hacks (of varying degrees of nastiness), and probably
>> make our primary platform (Tiger) more reliable.
>>
>> This only means that 10.3.9 users would be limited to using the
>> last 10.3-compatible release, whatever that happens to be, but it
>> would no longer be updated regularly.
>>
>> Apologies to those of you who receive this on bibdesk-users as
>> well; please reply to only one of the lists.
>
> I still use 10.3.9 on my main server machine.
Do you use BibDesk on that? :)
> Personally, I follow Apples strategy here with support. The current
> and previous version are supported. Hence, security fixes are being
> distributed by Apple for both 10.3.9 and 10.4, but not for 10.2.
> Likewise, i-Installer is compild for 10.3 and up (ppc) and 10.4
> (intel) and the binaris in the i-Packages are compild on 10.3 (ppc)
> and 10.4 (intel), making them compatible with all Apple systems
> 10.3.9 and up.
Thanks for the reply; I think yours is the best approach to take, in
general, but our problem is not just one of compiling/linking (easy in
our case). The problem is that we have introduced a lot of Tiger-only
functionality, so the application has various code paths that are only
executed on one of the platforms. We can only compile/develop on
Tiger or later at this point, and none of us (developers) has a 10.3.9
system to test on.
For example, given something like NSDocument's Save/Save As
architecture changes from 10.3-10.4, it's not clear that saving will
work correctly on 10.3.9 in a current nightly build (and requests for
testing on bibdesk-users were unanswered). If it breaks and someone
loses data, guess who gets the blame? At least i-Installer shouldn't
be responsible for wiping out a thesis bibliography :).
Additionally, the current version of BibDesk is really pretty good
(IMNSHO), so continuing to use it on 10.3.9 shouldn't be much of a
burden to users.
--
Adam
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