Re: gub targets + binary packages

[Carl Sorensen]

On 10/7/19, 1:10 PM, "Jonas Hahnfeld" <address@hidden> wrote:

    Am Montag, den 07.10.2019, 17:51 +0000 schrieb Carl Sorensen:
    > 
    > On 10/7/19, 11:27 AM, "lilypond-devel on behalf of Jonas Hahnfeld via 
lilypond-devel" <
    > lilypond-devel-bounces+c_sorensen=address@hidden
    >  on behalf of 
    > address@hidden
    > > wrote:
    > 
    >     Hi all,
    >     
    >     lately I've been playing with gub, partly to get python3 packaged. 
Upon
    >     inspection, it seems some targets are broken and some are ... a bit
    >     out-of-date:
    >     
    >     darwin-ppc: Support for applications targeting PowerPC was removed in
    >     Darwin 11.0 / Mac OS X 10.7, released in 2011.
    > 
    > That doesn't mean there aren’t people using PowerPC macs.  I don't think 
there is a reason to eliminate this target.
    
    If my search skills are right, the last model with a PowerPC processor
    was the Power Mac G5, with the latest revision released in late 2005.
    That's almost 14 years ago (on October 19, if Wikipedia is correct).
    
    What do you think would be a reasonable time frame to eliminate support
    for old hardware? From my perspective, it's always a trade-off between
    developer time and supporting users.

In my opinion, we could eliminate PowerPC support if it were broken.  Unless 
some PowerPC user wants to step up and do the maintenance, I wouldn't be 
concerned about removing it.  One of the theories of GUB is that the developer 
time in minimized for maintaining cross-platform build.  But as we can see, the 
theory doesn't always match  the practice.

But if it's not broken, I see no reason to remove it.  As long as the developer 
time is zero, we should leave it.
    
    >     darwin-x86: Support for 32-bit applications was removed in today's
    >     macOS 10.15.
    >     (darwin-64 is not currently supported in gub.)
    > 
    > darwin-64 is not likely to be supportable in gub.  We've had some long 
discussions on the -devel list; Apple has not released any 64-bit headers that 
are GPL compatible.  So providing darwin-x86 is probably the best we can do for 
supporting macOS users via the GUB distributions.  Again, no reason to 
eliminate -x86 just because the latest version of OS X doesn't support it.  
Many people (including me) have refused to update to 10.15 precisely because it 
breaks existing software that works well for me.
    > 
    >     
    >     The most important target is probably Windows / mingw, which is also
    >     32-bit but works on current 64-bit systems.
    >   
    > We also would like to get a 64-bit windows system going; 32-bit 
applications sometimes crash on large scores.  As far as I know, it is only a 
question of developer time to get a 64-bit windows build going.

That matches my understanding.

Thanks,

Carl