[Development] Remove OSX 10.6 Build?

[Kurt Pattyn]

> On 23 Jan 2014, at 21:16, Jan Farø <jan.faroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don’t think anybody has mentioned the lack of ability to upgrade hardware - mostly because of financial issues, I suppose. 10.6 is as far as I know the last Mac OS to support 32 bit systems. Previous versions of my own software supported PPC and down to Mac OS 10.4, which gave me a considerable user base from that segment. Percentages aside, there’s still a LOT of people sitting with old hardware, simply because they cannot afford to upgrade.
> 
> XP was introduced in 2001. It’s still supported. Mac OS 10.6 was introduced in 2009. I understand the desire to get rid of the messiness under the hood, but I think it should be considered that it cuts out users on hardware platforms not so much up to date.

Support for XP stops at end 2014: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/endofsupport.aspx.
And Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 cannot be installed on XP, but you can target XP (and that was already in 2012).

Why not just freeze the Qt development for 10.6? After all, developing for 10.6 will still be possible with Qt 5.3. I don’t see any problem here. It’s not that the code will get removed from the repo; it is only that no new developments will take place for that platform.
In the meanwhile, development energy can go into new territories like mobile and embedded devices (internet of things). Personally, I'd rather use Qt for developing an app for Android or iOS, than developing one for Windows XP or OS X 10.6. It is true that there is still a huge install base of 'legacy' OSs. Besides limited financial reach, there is also another reason: certification. In the medical market for instance, we see figures of 90% and up of Windows XP installations. But then on these systems no new applications are installed, nor is it expected that new applications are installable on those platforms. IT departments more and more switch to VDI to support these legacy systems.

So, +1 for freezing development for OSX 10.6.

—Kurt