[Development] Clarification on Mac 10.6 support for Qt 5.2

[Jake Thomas Petroules]

Well, Xcode 5.0 will be dropping support for GCC, so the only way to target 10.6 or below will be with clang + libstc++.

Supporting 10.6 is a huge priority given that version has the largest market share of all OS X versions (about 35%). Do we really want to wipe out over a third of potential end-users of Qt-based products? Dropping support for it at this point is an absolutely terrible idea, and 10.9 is not even revealed yet.

Secondly, it appears that the patch in question does not force use of libc++ ("Users who wish to deploy to 10.6 need to build their own Qt, passing -no-c++11 to configure.") unless I am missing something.

It would be irrelevant if Snow Leopard were 10 years old; what really matters is the fact it maintains a massive 35% market share of OS X versions and therefore is critical to provide support for. Most popular software packages seem to have recently switched to 10.6 as a minimum (Firefox, Chrome, Skype, to name a few).

10.5 came out in 2007 and was dropped by Qt in 2012. 10.6 came out in 2009 so let's drop 10.6 somewhere around 2015 or even 2016 (I add a year because of its higher market share). We should have 10.11 by then.
-- 
Jake Petroules
Chief Technology Officer
Petroules Corporation · www.petroules.com
Email: jake.petroules at petroules.com

On Jun 4, 2013, at 6:55 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:

> Hello all
> 
> As of 3d0a60aaa4077a8 in Qt 5.2, Qt requires libc++ in order to build on Mac 
> with clang. That means the minimum deployment target for macx-clang is 
> Mac OS X 10.7 now.
> 
> Question: do we want to keep supporting Mac OS X 10.6? If so, for how long?
> 
> And if not, can we drop macx-g++? The g++ compiler that comes bundled with 
> XCode is broken and horribly outdated.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> PS: OS X 10.9 is expected to be announced at WWDC this month. That means Qt 
> 5.2 will need to support 10.9. At the same time, 10.6's last update will be 
> over 2 years old when 5.2 ships.
> -- 
> Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
>  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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> Development at qt-project.org
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