On 1/13/22 5:01 PM, Bill Cole wrote:
On 2022-01-13 at 16:26:01 UTC-0500 (Thu, 13 Jan 2022 15:26:01 -0600)
Will Senn <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
[...]
My question for y'all goes like this - How long will macports
continue to "work" on Mojave?
No one can actually give a fixed date for that which you could
reasonably rely upon.
MacPorts still has support for Tiger. That's 10 releases older than
Mojave. It is unlikely that the aggregate 'vision' of the people doing
the work of keeping MP going will change so much as to drop Mojave
before it is simply impossible to continue to support it. If I recall
correctly, dropping Panther only happened because the last
Panther-capable machine available to the project died. Speaking only
as a long-time user and observer of MacPorts, I would be surprised if
Mojave support went away in this decade.
With that said, "support" in MacPorts' core is not the only thing to
be concerned with. One thing I found running Snow Leopard until last
February on a 32bit-only CoreDuo was that support in ports I was using
or tried to use was slowly crumbling over time, often beyond anything
MacPorts could work around. The biggest headaches weren't even rooted
in hardware or OS version per se, but in the toolchain
(gcc/clang/etc.) and runtime (libgcc/libcxx/etc.) evolution.
Re-bootstrapping my whole MacPorts world never became impossible, but
by the end it was a multi-day festivity involving building multiple
toolchains and learning obscure command-line options for port. It may
never become impossible for to keep using MacPorts on Mojave, but it
may end up taking so much babysitting that you'd rather not. I hope
that's a long time, because my personal machines are staying there for
some time as well.
Thanks for the response. I thought it was something along these lines,
but its reassuring to hear.
My Snow Leopard host, an old iMac, died before the lack of support got
too bad. My laptop will hopefully hold out a while longer. It's kinda
funny, but for a 10 year old machine, it' still quite respectable and is
actually more capable than my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 which can't even do
virtual box.
