Dropping support for OSX 10.4 in Miro 3.1

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Over the last year, supporting OSX 10.4 has been a pain in the ass for a bunch of reasons and is costing us a lot of development and testing time. Adding new features to Miro is cumbersome since we have to work around OSX 10.4's constraints and implement and test everything on three different versions of OSX.

For Miro 3.1, we're working on switching Miro from using a home-grown httpclient to using libcurl (bug 13010). We're also adding support for converting media files from one format to another (bug 13252). Both of these changes add external components that needs that needs binary kit support for OSX. After some discussion, we've decided to draw the line here.

Miro 3.1 and future versions will no longer be supported on OSX 10.4.

It's hard to tell exactly how many users are still using 10.4 since we don't sell Miro and we use OSUOSL for distributing binaries. We can get some probably-in-the-same-ballpark numbers from analytics on Miro Guide. I wrote some numbers in the minutes for the 04/07/2010 devcall. These numbers suggest that of the 470,000 users who looked at the Miro Guide, 12% of them are using OSX 10.4. Note that this is not 12% of all Miro users--just 12% of Miro users on OSX.

That's a large number of users and we're cognizant that dropping support for OSX 10.4 orphans these users. However, Miro 3.0 is a solid release, so it's not the case that we're orphaning them on a bad release.

It'd be great if someone who has OSX 10.4.11 installed wanted to take up the torch and continue support for Miro on that system. If you're interested, let me know and I'll hook you up with our OSX dev.

Comments, feedback, offers to help support OSX 10.4 going forward, offers to donate, ... leave them in the comments section.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.