[vlc-devel] Updating the minimum build environment for macOS

[David Fuhrmann]

Dear macOS developers,

As discussed during Turin meeting and other occasions, we would like to bump the minimum supported macOS build / development environment for vlc.git and the upcoming VLC 4, for all macOS related development.

Our proposal is to require at minimum:
macOS 10.13.4
Xcode 9.3 (with clang 9.1.0 (clang-902.0.39.1))
macOS SDK 10.13
(Note that the build result will still run on macOS 10.10+.)

Main reasons for this are:
Editing interface files (xib) with Xcode 9 automatically stores them in an backwards incompatible format (why, Apple, why?!) —> This forces us to use the Xcode 9 format, as most developers are now on 10.13 with Xcode 9 as the only supported version
macOS 10.13 SDK introduces a bunch of new features, which we will likely use in VLC (like Touch Bar APIs, videotoolbox, SecureTransport, …). It is not feasible anymore to ifdef everything out or forward-declare all APIs
The tools delivered with Xcode 9 support some nice new syntactic sugar, for instance you can now use "if (@available(macOS 10.13, iOS 11, *))“ for guarding new APIs

We would like to keep those minimum requirements stable for at least a year, ideally also for 4.0, and be a bit conservative on future updates again, if possible.

The buildbot (mac mini) will also need an update.

Please complain now, if you have important reasons against this move.

(Note: The vlc-3.0 branch should stay compatible with older dev environments, so please use Xcode 7 to edit the xib files here).

Best regards,
David
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