compatibility with early OSX

[John Ralls]

On Feb 15, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:

> I'm pretty sure that the GnuCash source code doesn't actually depend
> on any APIs that are present in 10.5 but that are not present in 10.2.
> I think the real issue is that it takes a lot of time and work to get
> GnuCash to build on any system at all, so the maintainers
> understandably want to limit their builds to the fewest systems that
> are likely to reach the most users.
> 
> Thus I expect that if you know how to write software, and you were to
> try to build GnuCash on 10.2, you could get a working GnuCash binary
> out of it.
> 
> But GnuCash has so very many dependencies that the difficulty of
> building GnuCash is absolutely legendary.  Thus you must have not only
> dedication, but nerves of steel, to succeed at a GnuCash build no
> matter what platform you are targeting.

It's true that Gnucash itself doesn't call anything requiring 10.4, but the quartz libraries in gtk+ do, as do cairo and pango, upon which gtk+ depends. You can get around that by using X11 instead of Quartz. (Gnucash 2.3.x's requirement for 10.5 stems from using WebKit instead of gtkhtml for html rendering; WebKitGtk won't build on 10.4.)

Regards,
John Ralls