[vlc-devel] [RFC] Dropping support for OS X 10.5

[Felix Paul Kühne]

Hello guys,

about 4 months ago, Rémi introduced the use of new atomic functions which are not supported by GCC 4.2, which is the latest compiler version available for Apple's PowerPC platform. Yes, you can compile clang yourself, but trust me, I've done that and it's nothing you'd want to use in a production environment.

Thus, VLC 2.1 will no longer run on OS X 10.5 on PowerPC-based Macs, which is fine due to the really low market share these machines got today (as mentioned in another thread, their download share is about 0.8 per cent of all OS X downloads [==a few ten thousands]).

I'm favoring a clean cut and to drop 10.5 entirely. It will become harder to support this platform while moving on to support 10.8 even better. This way, we could remove a bunch of complexity from the OS X interface, which will allow us to enhance the interface in an easier way. Additionally, we would get access to cool code features introduced in 10.6 such as blocks and other modern Obj-C improvements.
OS X 10.5 is still used by 10 to 15 per cent of all Macs world-wide. However, most of these should be PowerPC-based Macs since any Intel-based Mac can be upgraded to OS X 10.6. Users who don't care about this probably don't care about having the latest version of VLC, too, so I wouldn't care about them.

However, we would still have to provide versions for 2 architectures on OS X (32bit and 64bit Intel), since OS X 10.6 still supports the Yonah architecture (Core Solo and Core Duo), which is limited to 32bit. This isn't exactly a big deal though.

Opinions?


Felix