[Development] Clarification on Mac 10.6 support for Qt 5.2

[Robert Knight]

> 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.

For our website (where the main audience is students and researchers
and consequently quite Mac-biased) the OS X version split for the
previous month for OS X 10.5/6/7/8 was 4%, 23%, 28%, 45%.  I believe
the usage split for the Mac version of our app is similar, though I'd
have to confirm.  Similar numbers to what Jake reported in other words
and in our case, the proportion of OS X users on 10.6 is higher than
the proportion of Windows users still on XP.

I can see that a lot of work has gone into platform integration
improvements in Qt 5 so it would be great if we could benefit from
that without having to drop support for a large proportion of Mac
users.

> +1. If Qt drops support for OSX 10.6 we'll be unable to upgrade to 5.2+ for the foreseeable future.
> Unfortunately 10.6 is looking like Mac's XP.

The migration from OS X 10.5/6 to newer versions looks steadier than
for Windows for us at least.  On the other hand, Apple makes it
somewhat harder to support old versions of OS X compared to Windows.

Regards,
Rob.

On 5 June 2013 08:32, Olivier Goffart <olivier at woboq.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 June 2013 15:55:10 Thiago Macieira 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 XCode is broken and horribly outdated.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.
>
> This was already mentioned in the thread
> "[Announce] Changes to building Qt on Mac OS X"
>
> Can we not still target OS X 10.6 while using libc++?
> (provided of course that libc++ is also shipped with that application in
> addition to Qt for that platform)
>
> That way we can still support os x 10.6 while stopping supporting obsolete
> gcc.
>
> (Then we could start using C++11 features in Qt, such as auto or lambda, which
> I think are worth it)
>
> --
> Olivier
>
> Woboq - Qt services and support - http://woboq.com - http://code.woboq.org
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