[OS X TeX] comments on 10.3 support

[Adam R. Maxwell]

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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