Re: MacOS 10.6

On 2/2/21 3:39 PM, Matt Broughton wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 2, 2021, at 1:23 PM, Steve Letter via Gimp-print-devel
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> The only easily implemented option to continue support for Snow Leopard is to build a second
>> version without signing.  I haven't tested this but I think it would work.  Is this something we
>> really want though?
>>
>> Steve Letter You're never to old to learn something stupid.  -- unknown
> 
> Just thinking out loud here.  Would it make more sense to build an unsigned package for Snow Leopard
> 10.6 through Sierra 10.12?  I'm thinking that may may provide a longer term solution.  We would then
> have a fat binary with x86_64 and arm64 with a signed package for later versions of macos.

If I'm reading it correctly, 10.6 is the last release that supported 32-bit platforms.  It looks
like very few systems were orphaned by 10.7, basically the Core Solo and Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo).
 Other than a couple of Mac mini systems that lived on through August 2007, these were all
short-lived laptops that were discontinued at various times in 2006, so close to 15 years ago.  It
looks like a fair number more systems were orphaned by 10.8 (the Core 2 Duo ones, including some Mac
Pros that might have a longer lifespan), but after that, nothing was orphaned until 10.12, and then
only a few MacBook Air laptops.  However, 10.13 orphaned a lot of systems.

I would naively expect that there are more people running 10.12 (say) for whom signed packages are a
plus than people still running specifically 10.6, but maybe I'm wrong.  With the switch to a new
minor version, this seems like a convenient point to drop support for 10.6.  But again, I'm not a
Mac expert so I want to be a bit careful what I say.