Re: [MACTCL] [TCLCORE] Merging TkAqua Cocoa port into Tk HEAD

[Adrian R. <adr...@gm...>]

On May 18, 2009, at 4:38 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> Larry McVoy wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I'm a much smaller commercial vendor than Bitmover that also uses Tk
> (exclusively) on Mac OS, and I strongly endorse the move to support  
> only
> Cocoa in 8.6. 8.5 will continue to be available if you need pre-10.5
> support. I am curious how many of your customers use older versions of
> Mac OS? The tendency among Mac users is to migrate very quickly to the
> latest OS release, and with 10.6 due out later this year--even in the
> next couple of months--10.5 will soon become a legacy platform.

I don't have statistics to support this but anecdotally I know many  
people who have held off on Leopard for various reasons, and  
therefore as a software vendor I keep a machine myself on Tiger for  
debug and support purposes.  I'd suspect others do the same.  There  
are plenty of even Panther machines about for that matter.  Support  
for 10.4 at least is worth having for some time.

What is the technical reason for 10.5?  Is it GC or something else in  
ObjC-2.0, or is it a few new Leopard API methods here and there that  
could perhaps be easily #ifdef'd with workarounds for 10.4?  If so  
perhaps those of us interested in 10.4 could work on and maintain  
these, and Dan could continue to focus on 10.5.

-Adrian