[Development] Remove OSX 10.6 Build?

[Simon Hausmann]

On Tuesday 21. January 2014 10.23.22 Sorvig Morten wrote:
> On 21 Jan 2014, at 09:32, Simon Hausmann <simon.hausmann at digia.com> wrote:
> > On Monday 20. January 2014 20.21.14 deDietrich Gabriel wrote:
> >> On Jan 20, 2014, at 7:55 PM, Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde at carewolf.com> 
wrote:
> >>> On Monday 20 January 2014, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> >>>> On segunda-feira, 20 de janeiro de 2014 17:36:26, Kurt Pattyn wrote:
> >>>>> The CI system is still building for OSX 10.6.
> >>>>> Given the fact that OSX is at version 10.9 now, shouldn’t the build
> >>>>> for
> >>>>> 10.6 be removed, and ideally replaced with a build for OSX 10.9?
> >>>> 
> >>>> Only if we decide to stop supporting 10.6 entirely. So the question is:
> >>>> do
> >>>> we drop it?
> >>>> 
> >>>> Mac devs, what say you?
> >>> 
> >>> Could we drop support for build on 10.6, but still support it as runtime
> >>> platform? That seems to be how Apple prefers to support older versions.
> >>> The
> >>> question is of course if out CI system would be able to handle building
> >>> on
> >>> 10.7 but running  on 10.6
> >> 
> >> IIRC, this has been the official statement since Qt 5.0. And yet, for
> >> some
> >> reason, the CI is treating 10.6 as any other platform.
> >> 
> >> If you do the math from the data available here
> >> http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10
> >> &q
> >> pcustomd=0 (that’s December 2013), 10.6 accounts for slightly less than
> >> 20%
> >> of all the OS X versions. Let’s suppose those numbers reflect the
> >> reality.
> >> 
> >> Is 20% a lot? I don’t know. Is that 20% the same proportion for Qt 5
> >> end-users? Or Qt 5 developers making a life out of it? Absolutely no
> >> idea.
> >> Do I see that many bugs reported on 10.6? No, not at all.
> >> 
> >> The truth is, market share doesn’t mean anything. Point in case:
> >> According
> >> to the link above, OS X is less than 8% of the total market share. Should
> >> we then drop the Mac port completely?
> >> 
> >> For all I know, that twenty-something percent of Mac users running 10.6
> >> or
> >> earlier are all grandma and grandpa who only use Safari, Skype, and maybe
> >> some spreadsheet software for tax returns. For all I know, none of them
> >> use
> >> any Qt 5 based software. And why would they? They haven’t updated their
> >> system in years… But maybe I’m wrong, and I’d like to be proven so.
> >> 
> >> So, can someone tell me what that 20% really means for Qt 5 and its
> >> developers? This is what it means for me.
> >> 
> >> We are not that many working on the Mac port. I can think about 6-8
> >> people,
> >> including me, and AFAIK none of us works 100% on the Mac port (I’d say
> >> the
> >> average is below 50%, so that’s 3-4 full-time people maximum). And the
> >> widgets Mac style code is a mess because we still support 10.6. And we
> >> can’t still use ARC because of 10.6 and some old Xcode version. And have
> >> you seen the CoreWLAN bear management plugin and how we support 10.6?
> >> Fullscreen mode hacks? Thank 10.6. Building WebKit and C++ 11, anyone?
> >> 
> >> Don’t give me “But 20% market share” or “The XP of Apple” when the debate
> >> about ending support for 10.6 comes. Give me facts. Give me numbers that
> >> concern Qt 5. Give me reasons why we should keep parts of Qt in such
> >> unsatisfactory state.
> >> 
> >> I only work on my little things, and 10.6 is a burden for me. So, you who
> >> work out there, that see people using Qt 5 apps, tell me, is it worth it?
> > 
> > I wholeheartedly agree with Gabriel.
> > 
> > We all are contributing to the Qt project - as opposed to private forks of
> > Qt - because we want to grow the overall success of Qt, we want it to
> > become even more popular among software developers. However we do have
> > limited resources, so when we decide to spend time on something, it is
> > very important to ask ourselves: How does for example working on 10.6
> > contribute to the popularity of Qt compared to making it kick-ass on more
> > recent versions of Mac OS X?
> > 
> > In my opinion the answer is crystal clear: We should provide first class
> > integration with the latest Mac OS X technologies / frameworks, we should
> > make life easier for application developers. I doubt that we can grow Qt
> > faster by looking to the past - the future of Qt is more tightly
> > connected to staying relevant and up-to-date with what's going on in the
> > rest of the software industry.
> > 
> > 
> > I personally like the suggestion brought up elsewhere of keeping things as
> > they are for Qt 5.3 and dropping 10.6 from the CI system and supported
> > platforms for 5.3 - while simultaneously reviewing and approving patches
> > by
> > other members of the community that continue to have an interest in 10.6
> > support.
> 
> I agree with many of these arguments, and I was in favor of setting the
> minimum supported version to 10.7 back when we started Qt 5 development.
> But we did make the decision to support 10.6. The implementation effort has
> been made and that decision should be respected.
> 
> Obviously it’s not going to stand forever, especially when seeing the strong
> opinions from the Qt on Mac developers. We are moving in the direction of
> not supporting 10.6. The 5.3 binary packages will not support it. QtWebkit
> lives its own life - if upstream does not support 10.6 then there is little
> we can do.
> 
> When we drop support for 10.6 we are going to remove the 10.6 code and start
> using ARC. I don’t think there’s much room for "community support" for 10.6
> - if we have to keep the manual reference counting code paths we might as
> well fully support it.

Excellent points, that makes the choice a binary one indeed.

In your opinion - as the lead Qt on Mac guy - what should be the last released 
version of Qt to support deployment to 10.6?


Simon