[Qt-creator] Qt Creator 3.2 dropping support for Mac OS X 10.6

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Ziller Eike <Eike.Ziller at digia.com> wrote:

> On Jan 24, 2014, at 7:12 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.org> wrote:
>
> > At the risk of asking a naive, but well-intentioned question, I wonder
> if we aren't looking at this the wrong way.
> >
> > Anyone is free to rebuild QT Creator from source on any environment they
> want. The impediment going forward is that > Which begs the question: why
> can't people who need QT Creator on OSX 10.6 bring up a more recent version
> of the GCC/Binutils toolchain or a more recent version of CLang and build
> QT Creator for themselves?
>
> They probably can. But it would not be anything the Qt Project or Qt
> Creator team would support. Also, deploying such an application would
> probably get more complicated, since the non-standard libraries that this
> would end up using need to be bundled and shipped as well.
>
> The same goes for non-Apple-provided lldb on Mac OS 10.6.


What Eike says here is true, but potentially confusing.

If the shipping application is still being compiled with the old SDK, there
shouldn't be any new libraries required for the application. You'll need to
configure a tool chain to invoke the proper version of qmake, of course,
but that's very doable.

For building Qt Creator *itself*, yes, Adam would need a newer tool chain
to do the build and he would need to redistribute a bunch of runtime
components associated with the non-standard compiler within his company. In
addition, Adam would probably need to re-integrate the GDB/lldb support or
whatever debugger is current on OSX 10.6. The old code can probably be
brought forward into newer versions of QT Creator without a huge amount of
work, but it's a task that needs to be done.

In short, Adam, it's really time for your company to drop support for OSX
10.6 :-)

As a practical matter, I agree with the earlier suggestion that you should
upgrade your development machines and use virtual machines to do
command-line builds for legacy releases. As much as you may like Qt Creator
as a debugging IDE, there are very few bugs that will manifest *only* on
10.6. Most of the time, debugging them on a newer platform will solve them
on the older platform as well. For the few exceptions, command line
GDB/lldb really isn't that bad an option.

Another option to explore for legacy debugging on OSX 10.6 would be having
QMake generate an Xcode project file and using XCode to do your debugging.


Jonathan
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