[Interest] minimum macOS runtime version for Qt 5.9+

[Shawn Rutledge]

> On 29 Nov 2017, at 04:46, Jake Petroules <Jake.Petroules at qt.io> wrote:
> 
>> http://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.10/supported-platforms.html suggests that 5.10 will increase this requirement further to 10.11+. Why is this?
> 
> We decided it wasn't worth the resources to continue testing with 10.10. macOS upgrades are now free and the overwhelming majority of users are on the latest version.
> 
> Why do you need to support older versions?

Because of perfectly good hardware that Apple has decided is now too old to upgrade the OS any further.  Or because of a perception that newer OSes have more bugs, or are slower, or the UI design isn’t as nice…  people have their reasons, just like there are still die-hard 10.6 users out there.

I see the other side of it too: when supporting old APIs makes Qt code ugly and hard to maintain, or when the Xcode version has a compiler that is not meeting our needs, that plus obsolescence together are good reasons to upgrade the minimum requirement.  But I think we should be sure how much better we are making it, not just assume it’s normal that the latest Qt only builds on the latest macOS versions.

I now have two dual-Xeon MacPro’s at work (different ages) which are powerful enough for development but can’t be upgraded any further, therefore can’t get the latest Xcode, and so on.  (One at least has 10.12, so this problem will arise later when 10.13 is the minimum requirement.)  And I see this as a symptom of the planned-obsolescence treadmill, nothing more.  Apple wants to sell hardware, we help them do it (but they don’t pay us to), our company has to keep paying for new hardware, our customers have to do the same, and the older machines pile up because they are too beautiful and work too well to throw out.  I really don’t see anything fundamentally good about that, unless it helps us improve our code enough to be worth it.