[Interest] Mac: a bit of 10.9 love

[Michael Jackson]

I am curious to find out just how many customers of your application 
there are that are _still_ on macOS 10.9?

Even if it is just a few why are you letting just a few customers hold 
you back from using newer compilers, versions of C++, newer tools. Why 
are you letting those few customers make you take your valuable time to 
backport all this stuff? Unless those are customers that are paying you 
a lot of money to keep the compatibility or there is a hard contractual 
requirement to keep the compatibility...

In our own project we tried to maintain that backward compatibility but 
we finally realized that we were just holding ourselves back because we 
didn't have access to all the new C++ features in C++11, 14 and upcoming 
17 specs that we wanted to use. Both to code more efficiently and to 
make our lives easier. We just started punting old compilers and support 
for those. We did one last release based on the older libraries, 
informed our users of the migration to newer tools and have not looked back.

-- 
Michael A. Jackson
BlueQuartz Software, LLC
[e]: mike.jackson at bluequartz.net


René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Thursday August 03 2017 17:11:56 Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
>
>> Didn't Qt only drop support for building on 10.9? I am pretty sure
>> you should be able to build on 10.10+ and deploy to 10.9 if you
>> wish. Though I can see
>
> Nope, sadly that's not the case (and I doubt it was the intention
> either). You can still install Qt 5.9.1, once you figure out how to
> run the installer - last time I tried even the MaintenanceTool.app
> insisted on self-updating to a new version that crashed immediately
> because of missing symbols referenced from the cocoa QPA. I filed a
> QTBUG-61800 about that because it made it impossible to update even
> supported Qt versions on OS versions not supported by the latest Qt
> version.
>
> The workaround trick I found was to force Qt to use the generic Unix
> QPA, which is good enough for basic installers but evidently not for
> a meaningful user experience.
>
> On Thursday August 03 2017 15:14:52 Alexandru Croitor wrote:
>> Iirc the minimum deployment version was bumped to 10.10 in qt 5.9.
>> That was also a change we had to do in webengine
>
> I'm expecting to run into>=10.10 requirements elsewhere in Qt 5.9
> when I get around to building it, and I was already afraid that QWE
> would require more attention than I really care to give it (it's way
> too big to start hacking around in) ... But, "had to" as in "were
> obliged to" rather than "chose to"? Why - the BT code that already
> required using the 10.10 SDK maybe? All incompatibilities I've seen
> in the style and QPA were quite trivial to address (except for those
> requiring the "full" 10.10 SDK which 10.9 never got).
>
> With some luck it will still be possible to build QWE 5.8 against Qt
> 5.9 though, should there be too much to reintroduce (and I wouldn't
> mind either dropping BT support either in my build).
>
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