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

[Felix Paul Kühne]

John,

On 17.08.2012, at 18:31, John Oyler <john.m.oyler at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 06:10:01PM +0200, Rafaël Carré wrote :
>>> Le 2012-08-17 18:09, Jean-Baptiste Kempf a écrit :
>>>> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 06:08:06PM +0200, Rafaël Carré wrote :
>>>>>> Drop both PPC and i686.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It looks simpler to me too, does 10.7 support i686 ?
>>>> 
>>>> no.
>>> 
>>> Then we can bump the 10.5 requirement to 10.7 directly ..
>> 
>> No.
>> 
>>> IIUC OSX upgrades are cheaper since 10.7 so maybe there are not much
>>> 10.6 users?
>> 
>> Nope. Many people have skipped 10.7 because it did not bring much to
>> 10.6. Many claim that there are even important regressions.
>> And 10.6.8 is quite recent, to be honest.
>> 
>> Moreover, dropping a platform, just for dropping it is stoopid, IMNSHO.
>> If it does not simplify our code and our load of work, this is not a
>> good idea.
> 
> I have two iMacs at home. One is a G5 2gigs ram running 10.5.8 and the
> latest VLC. This is used by my 3 yr old daughter to watch cartoons...
> both from file, and from a Youtube playlist. Happy with it as is,
> can't imagine needing a later version of VLC, so not upset at all
> about you guys dropping support.
> 
> The second iMac is our primary computer, a 2008 model. It's running
> 10.5 also... mostly because there are a ton of other upgrades I'd want
> to do simultaneously before I bump it to 10.6. But if I have to
> upgrade to that, wouldn't be upset there either... my laziness is not
> an excuse to keep bad code in the tree. However, I'm not sure I'm
> willing to upgrade further than that. I do not know if I am the
> typical user, but we are talking about an operating system (10.6) that
> was current until the middle of 2011. Unless it is excessively
> problematic to continue, I beg you guys not to drop support for it
> yet. I suspect that it might require me to buy a new machine to
> upgrade that far.

Thanks for your feedback. You are strongly supporting my idea about keeping 10.6 support.
Since you can upgrade all Intel-based devices to 10.6 for just $29 and gain access to a huge number of up-to-date apps, it's probably worth for most users.
Additionally, it's a great modern and stable OS for a huge number of users who don't care about Lion's features or even dislike them like the next Exposé behavior, etc.

Finally, VLC 2.0.x is the best release for non-acient PowerPC devices we did so far (e.g. multicore decoding!). Of course, it doesn't stop working the day we release VLC 2.1 with support for new technologies which won't be available on 6 year old devices. I might even continue to do bugfix releases like when we dropped 10.4 support a few years ago.

Best regards,

Felix