Re: Roadblock MacOSX 10.4 for release of LilyPond 2.16

[David Kastrup]

Stan Sanderson <address@hidden> writes:

> On Feb 4, 2012, at 5:07 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> James Worlton <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>>> On Feb 3, 2012, at 10:30 AM, James Worlton wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On my PPC 10.4 machine Lily 2.15.26 was the last one that ran (the
>>>> GUI) without problems. I am not near my machine now, and so I can't
>>>> test if 2.15.27 will run from the command line. I'll test that
>>>> tonight.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> So, I'm a bit late with the results of this test. But I can say that
>>> the most
>>> recent dev. version, 2.15.28, DOES compile and provide output if
>>> you run Lily from the command line. It appears the problem is solely
>>> related to the GUI.
>>> 
>>> Mac OS X 10.4
>>> Dual 2.7 GHz PPC G5
>> 
>> I have an hour of developer time from Graham left that I earned with a
>> job I did for him.  He estimates that the preexisting work and analysis
>> should make this suffice for him getting the MacOSX changes required
>> into GUB.  For the sake of getting a stable release out soon, I am
>> willing to make that issue go away.
>> 
>> However, it will also go away by declaring MacOSX PPC an unsupported
>> platform.  I don't see any rationale why I should ask Graham to do the
>> work just out of his heart's goodness.  And if the MacOSX PPC community
>> does not consider this task worth the 70€ for which I would let my
>> remaining Graham hour go (and it is definitely a steal), there is no
>> point in anybody investing the work for a platform nobody is interested
>> spending any resources on.
>
> This is the first I've seen that PPC is to be totally abandoned. I'm
> running the the development version on my PowerBook G4, OS 10.5.8,
> with no problems. What will change to take that functionality away?

I have no idea as I am not a MacOSX user.
<URL:code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2271> has the details
(concerns the GUI it seems).  If the _current_ version works for you,
there is no reason to suspect it to stop doing so.  Nobody is breaking
things on purpose.  But nobody is going to fix things on purpose either,
if nobody cares about them.

> I would truly like to be able to dig into the code, and many years ago
> I would have offered to help. I once taught programming. However, the
> learning curve would be precipitously steep, and I'm afraid somewhat
> Sisyphean!

Which is why somebody else should do it out of the goodness of their
heart.  At some point of time the goodness gets spread a bit thin, and
you have to expect spotty coverage.

-- 
David Kastrup