[OS X TeX] Mactex and PowerPC processors

[tkiffe]

I tried running the pretest version of mactex 2016 on an iMac with a PowerPC processor with OS X 10.5.6. Dvips crashed immediately with a segmentation fault and xdvi immediately quit, complaining that the libX11 library did not have the appropriate code. I didn’t do any further testing with mactex 2016 but I did go back to previous versions of mactex and had the same crashes with the 2013, 2014, and 2015 mactex distributions. I didn’t go back further than 2013.

There were no problems with the pretest 2016 on an iMac with an intel processor running 10.5.6.

Out of curiosity I tried building the 2015 texlive binaries from the texlive sources on the PowerPC iMac and immediately ran into serious compilation errors with the gmp library, xetex, etc.Perhaps it is time to drop support for PowerPC processors. I think the last Macs with PowerPC processors were built in 2006
or 2007

Tom