Hi Larry,

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 22:40, Larry McVoy <lm@[...].com>  wrote:
> > The principal new constraint of the TkAqua Cocoa port is that it
> > requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later (TkAqua currently requires Mac OS X
> > 10.3).
> 
>  Does this mean that if we upgrade to 8.6 we drop support for anything
>  earlier than 10.5 for _all_ tk apps?

yes, for TkAqua anyway, you could always fallback to TkX11 of course

>  Or is it only an issue if you want to use the new stuff?  I.e., is it
>  a flag day or a choice?

a flag day, IMO it is not feasible to interleave the two codebases
into the same sourcefiles via #ifdefs, it would make things even less
maintainable than the current Carbon code (difficult enough to
maintain as is)

the only reasonable other option would be to have a separate source
directory in tk for the new cocoa port (or better move the contents of
the current 'macosx' directory to tk/macosx-legacy or somesuch) and
add a configure flag that lets you switch back to carbon.

The main drawback with that idea (other than making a mess in
unix/Makefile.in) are lack of maintainer resources.
Quite honestly, I have zero interest in continuing to maintain the
Carbon code now that the Cocoa port is done, and me being the only
active Mac OS X Tk maintainer, the legacy codebase is certain to
bitrot fairly quickly on the ever-changing HEAD.

As evidence of this, see the rapid bitrot of the mac classic codebase
(which still ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4), even though this was on a less
frequently changing maintenance branch it became unbuildable pretty
much immediately after I removed mac classic support from the mainline
and stopped maintenance on the 8.4 codebase, and now is only so much
dead weight that has been shipping with the last 10 or so 8.4
releases, all because we wanted to be prudent and not withdraw support
for the platform on the stable branch at the time (in effect the users
lost support very quickly anyway because nobody was maintaining the
code anymore...).

>  If it is a flag day, that raises serious problems for us, we'll probably
>  have to stay one whatever is the pre-merge.  10.5 is the current release
>  and it's awfully hard to tell customers they have to upgrade their os
>  that is only a couple of years old (we support other platforms with
>  releases as old as 1996, or 13 years).

I'm guessing that none of those have the update frequency and API
churn of Mac OS X however, the Carbon API that TkAqua is using
currently is EOL and in life support mode.

FWIW Omni has some stats on 10.5 adoption at large, over 55% of their
users are running 10.5 currently, and once 10.6 is out (which will
almost certainly be before Tk 8.6 goes final), the percentage of users
still running 10.4 or earlier is certain to decrease even more rapidly
    http://update.omnigroup.com/

>  Perhaps we're the only commercial vendor left using tk that is always
>  interested in 8.6.  I would have thought there are others but maybe
>  not.  Anyway, if it is a flag day let me register my strong vote
>  against that idea.

Larry, you being a commercial vendor and all, if this is a big issue
for you, I would suggest you put up and provide maintainer resources
for the Carbon port!

If one of your engineers takes over maintaining the Carbon codebase, I
will put in the time to modify the buildsystem for a parallel carbon
and cocoa source dirs (which will still take several weeks to get done
however, swamped with work that actually pays the bills ATM) and I
will happily be the maintainer for TkAqua Cocoa only from then on and
let you guys deal with Carbon...

I won't put in that time however just to be left holding the bag with
an unmaintained bitrotting legacy codebase that we'll be dragging
around for several more years without it doing any good to anybody...

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen                   **
** <mailto:das@[...].net>   **

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