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build: drop support for OS X 10.6 #9511

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@adg

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@adg

As discussed in #9495, it might be time to end our support for OS X 10.6.

I'm trying to find Apple's policy on supporting older versions of OS X, but it appears they haven't published anything publicly. (Which seems outrageous to me, but whatever.)

The major concern, I believe, is that OS X 10.6 is the newest version of OS X that runs on pre-EFI macs (or something?). I think @robpike actually has one of these old machines.

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added this to the Go1.5 milestone on Jan 5, 2015
josharian

josharian commented on Jan 5, 2015

@josharian
Contributor

FWIW, I also have a very old 10.6 machine around that I still use. However, I would be happy to just use 1.4 in perpetuity on that machine.

minux

minux commented on Jan 5, 2015

@minux
Member

Having thought about this more, I think we probably should
announce the intention to remove support for 10.6 in Go 1.6
now, and make 1.5 the last version to support 10.6.

This will give 10.6 user enough time to migrate and also 1.5
is such a major leap. As 10.6 is supported now, supporting
it in 1.5 probably won't incur a lot of work for us.

bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Jan 5, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

This isn't like we're dropping some old Linux version that people might still have in production. This is dropping support for an ancient desktop Mac, where Go 1.4 would continue to work.

minux

minux commented on Jan 5, 2015

@minux
Member

I've sent an email to golang-nuts, let's see.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/-ESF2OhZlBk

landonbjones

landonbjones commented on Jan 5, 2015

@landonbjones

This list of security updates, http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1222, shows that last one for OS X 10.6 was 12 Sept 2013. It would be nice for Apple to say publicly that they are dropping support, but when there hasn't been a security update for over a year and known issues are out there I would consider support dropped.

sdouche

sdouche commented on Jan 5, 2015

@sdouche

I'm trying to find Apple's policy on supporting older versions of OS X, but it appears they haven't published anything publicly. (Which seems outrageous to me, but whatever.)

From this link:

Is my Mac OS X operating system supported?
Q. Where can I find information about operating systems supported by Apple?

A. Generally Apple does not officially acknowledge the end of support for Mac OS X
operating systems. Historically, Apple’s support has been limited to 2-3 recent
operating system releases. When Apple releases security updates for Mac OS,
operating systems with vulnerabilities that are no patched by Apple should be
considered unsupported and out of compliance with the Mininum Security
Standards for Network Devices (MSSND).

The current list of supported Mac OS X operating systems (as of 2014-10-30):

OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion"
OS X 10.9 "Mavericks"
OS X 10.10 "Yosemite"

I'd say it's pragmatic to drop the N-5 version.

bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Jan 8, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

Speaking of which, can we drop support for 32-bit OS X builds too? When was the last time Apple sold a 32-bit Mac?

Camlistore had to add a warning for Mac users because enough of them were finding themselves with a 32-bit Go installed on accident and then having problems, e.g. linking against a 64-bit sqlite.

josharian

josharian commented on Jan 8, 2015

@josharian
Contributor

It's really useful to be able to do my 386 testing on my 64 bit OS X machine.

bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Jan 8, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

That's valid.

But we can at least stop distributing builds from http://golang.org/dl/ if they're useless and misleading for almost everybody.

I'm fine with continuing to run a darwin-386 builder to keep it working for Go developer use cases.

bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Jan 8, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

According to Twitter, it's been 7-8 years since Apple sold a 32-bit Mac: https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/553298936832589825

griesemer

griesemer commented on Jan 8, 2015

@griesemer
Contributor

+1 for being able to run 32bit binaries on the mac. I just used this this morning.

minux

minux commented on Jan 8, 2015

@minux
Member

Not distributing 32-bit packages for Mac SGTM.
But please don't drop support for darwin/386.
(we need to consider 386 developers that use OS X)

IMHO, as long as Darwin still supports running 32-bit
programs, we should continue to support it.

bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Jan 8, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

I only want to remove them from the downloads page.

6 remaining items

robpike

robpike commented on Apr 11, 2015

@robpike
Contributor

I propose we don't explicitly unsupport it but don't worry about maintaining it. This is essentially the whole world's policy.

minux

minux commented on Apr 12, 2015

@minux
Member
bradfitz

bradfitz commented on Apr 12, 2015

@bradfitz
Contributor

They may be "passing", but in several cases that's just because they're skipping tests. It's the same reason that plan9 is "ok" on the dashboard.

minux

minux commented on Apr 12, 2015

@minux
Member
rsc

rsc commented on Apr 28, 2015

@rsc
Contributor

Rob and I discussed this, and we propose that for Go 1.5, we will say something along the lines of "The port to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is no longer actively maintained." That is, we won't go out of our way to delete it or break it, but we're also not going to make any attempt to keep it working or to fix issues specific to that version of OS X.

I should add that there are no plans to stop supporting GOARCH=386 on later versions of OS X, as long as OS X will run the resulting binaries. Being able to run a 32-bit toolchain on 64-bit x86 systems is too nice to give up without a fight.

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          build: drop support for OS X 10.6 · Issue #9511 · golang/go