[toolbox] What OS releases are (still) in use?

[Maarten S. <maa...@xs...>]

Hello list,

It's been too long, but I've been busy for the mactex portion of the  
new TeXLive DVD. During testing, we've once again discovered that the  
rapid change coming from Apple has made it hard to support older  
releases of the OS, in particular Jaguar (10.2).

In a private mail exchange between me and Adam Maxwell, the following  
arose:

>> On a broader note (and perhaps this should be transferred to the  
>> list): does anyone have any idea about the OS releases BibDesk/ 
>> TeXShop/i-Installer users are running? How offended would people  
>> be by an alert asking them to report the OS version, giving a  
>> proper explanation of why we are interested?
>
> We don't collect any statistics on that, so I have no idea.  Based  
> on crash reports, I'd estimate 2/3 Tiger and 1/3 Panther for  
> BibDesk; since no one reported the fact that 1.1.7 was broken on  
> Jaguar, 10.2 has to be a small minority.  If we came up with a  
> framework that any interested projects could use, that would be  
> cool (I don't think Omni has open-sourced theirs).  Maybe on the  
> toolbox list?  I'm curious as well.

So I put it to the list:

Is anyone aware of the Mac OS X versions that are currently in use?  
And of course especially the distribution of that use in our audience.

Does anyone have code to gather this information over the internet? I  
must stress that we should never do this "in secrecy", always ask the  
user whether he/she wants to participate in this check or not.

Maarten