Hi everyone,
Thought I'd chime in to shed a little light on why we dropped PPC
support.
First of all, to kiddailey and anyone else still using Versions on a
PPC machine, I'm sorry that this affects you. Seeing support for your
machine dropped in a minor update of an app is also unusual, which
makes this an even more unpleasant surprise.
Below is some background on our decision.
Leading up to Versions 1.1, we had to make quite a few decisions on
how to move the app forward. One of the biggest decisions we made was
to drop Mac OS X 10.4 support. As anyone who's coded for both 10.4 and
10.5 knows, dropping 10.4 really makes quite a difference in
development productivity. We were comfortable making this change for
Versions 1.1 because only 1 to 1.5% of all active Versions users were
still using Mac OS X 10.4.
Additionally, less than 1% of Versions' active users were still on PPC
Macs. The final nail in the coffin (data-wise) for PPC support was
that about half of the remaining PPC users were also on 10.4. So
beyond dropping 10.4, also dropping PPC would affect less than 0.5% of
all Versions users.
The below graphs visualize the data that informed our decision:
Mac OS X releases: http://yfrog.com/h6svvcp
Architectures: http://yfrog.com/gz41tkp
(both graphs display a 7-day moving average to eliminate some noise —
for those interested, both Intel and more modern OS versions are
slightly, just a tiny bit, more popular in the weekends. This final
graph shows Intel/PPC day by day without any averaging:
http://yfrog.com/h67oo4p)
To be fair, supporting PPC takes way less effort than supporting Mac
OS X 10.4 does, but it still takes effort. Most importantly, we need
to test on every architecture and OS combination that we support for
every release. With an app as big as Versions, you'd be surprised how
often you still run into PPC-only issues during pre-release testing.
Keeping a functional PPC machine around (and replacing it when it
stops being functional) is also getting harder and harder. If it took
zero effort to keep supporting PPC, we would keep supporting it.
But given our experience, we think we can deliver more positive value
to more people by dropping PPC support. It sucks that this means a
handful of Versions users will get no more functionality updates, but
to make an omelette you've got to break some eggs.
I understand that none of this makes dropping PPC any more popular
with people with PPC Macs, but I hope this at least shows we didn't
make a rash or random decision.
Cheers,
- Dirk
the Versions team
PS: @kiddailey: Thanks for the nice words about Versions, that means a
lot. :)
On Feb 28, 7:46 am, kiddailey kiddai...@gmail.com wrote:
Well said, TheDo. And you're right, I could work around this using
the Terminal, but I've come to love the GUI (and having grown up on
DOS and swearing as a kid that I'd *never* use a GUI, that says a
lot :) and Versions specifically.
For what it's worth, the other well-made OS X SVN client that I was
evaluating Versions against still supports PPC (though 10.5 is
required). Depending on Sofa's response, I guess that's my
alternative -- at least, until they drop PPC support too :/
On Feb 28, 1:23 am, TheDO Webmaster webmas...@thedigitalorchard.ca
wrote:
I agree with you. Subversion works equally well on all of these machines,
why can't Versions? I think that's where the distinction needs to be made.
Versions is not Subversion. It's a pretty wrapper around it. To continue
using older machines, I think we need to accept this and learn the use the
tools of our trade without the fancy interfaces sometimes. A little Terminal
knowledge can let you continue to use these machines with equal power.
/TheDO/
On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 10:17 PM, kiddailey kiddai...@gmail.com wrote:
I have the hardware. Eight machines to be exact. Three of which are
a variety of Intel Macs and two of which are PPC Macs. They are all
running a variation of OS X versions. The other three others are
Windows XP, Vista and 7. I test on all of them and use SVN as my
bridge for getting updates of the various branches of the software to
each.
The issue is not in not having the hardware.
On Feb 28, 12:54 am, Alex Zavatone alexzavat...@gmail.com wrote:
But really, I had a quad processor G5 that was last made in 2006.
That's
5 years ago. Apple doesn't even support the G5 anymore with the new OS or
the current one.
They might be fine machines (we even used a G4 for a server for a long
time and I still have my TI) but they aren't being made anymore and the
market sure isn't growing.
On another note, I purchased a Quad processor Intel iMac last year (1067
MHz speed RAM) refurbed from Apple for 1400 bucks. It's just so nice and
the current ones with RAM at 1333MHz are simply nutty fast.
Sniff around here, I'm sure you'll see something you like that's
affordable.
