Oldest supported OS X version

[John Ralls]

On Nov 17, 2012, at 5:02 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> On 16-11-12 00:48, John Ralls wrote:
>> On Nov 15, 2012, at 9:49 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
>> 
>>> What is the oldest version of OS X we support (particularly for trunk) ?
>>> 
>>> I'm asking because I'm doing some guile cleanups in trunk and incidentally noticed several parts (unrelated to guile) where exceptions are written in code to cater for old OS X versions (10.1, 10.2,...). If these versions are no longer supported (for example because we already use library versions that are not supported on those systems), I am inclined to remove these.
>>> 
>>> I know we have a quartz build and also fink/macports builds. So I'm interested to know for each of those.
>> Let's peg it at 10.5, which is I think the earliest for which one can build WebKitGtk. That's also the last version which supported PowerPC Macs, and it's what I've been building the app-bundles to support.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
> Those are good arguments.
> 
> I have two follow up questions:
> - Should we add a runtime check to prevent users from trying to run a newer package on an unsupported OS X version ?
> - Should we mention this somewhere on the download page ? Perhaps similar to how we handle this with Windows: the download section there reads "Windows XP, Vista, 7". Starting with GnuCash 2.6 we may change the OS X download section to read "Mac OS X Leopard and up". I'm not sure that will improve readability of the download block though.

I don't think that there are enough people out there using pre-10.5 OSX that we should worry about it. Gnucash.app flat won't start because the linker will refuse to link older built-in libraries than the ones I use to build with. We haven't had a noticeable number of questions on the user list from people trying to run Gnucash on 10.4, and that's been the minimum since we switched to WebKit with 2.4.

Regards,
John Ralls