But think about it: Even if they gave us a Classic engine today, the feature parity would be short-lived. Soon after there would be a new version of Rev, and we all understand they can't support forever an OS Apple themselves abandoned long ago.
Richard, Chipp, Paul, and others
Those tirades for uselessness of OS9 and its support are missing the point. Nobody is arguing that effort in producing OS9 version could not be used "better", although whatever RR does, somebody won't be happy. It is a business decision of RR what they do.
Let me just remind that what started this thread was an innocent inquiry whether we can expect 2.8.1 for OS9 since 2.7 was "promised" but never materialized. This is along the same lines as the other thread discussing RR starting public beta for 2.7.5 but releasing 2.8 and 2.8.1 instead. Inquiring minds want to know about OS9, but obviously this is a wrong forum to ask this, and thus this whole discussion is waste of time and electrons.
I believe he's right: AFAIK, there's no compiler which will let you build for both Intel Macs and Classic. All modern compilers have abandoned Classic. This would mean that not only would building for Classic require forking throughout the codebase, but would require forking every element in their process, and maintaining a separate set of outdated headers, some of which may be incompatible with modern replacements and require additional forking.
I don't know how Rev is building different releases, so there is no point to speculate as to what is involved and what stalled them from releasing 2.7 build for OS9.
And all to deliver 15 minutes of feature parity for people who can't really use most v2.7 and 2.8's new features in Classic anyway.
To be honest, feature parity is not it. If something makes no sense for OS9, there is no reason to have it included. There is no and has never been full feature parity for all platforms anyway. However, considering a decent number of fairly old bugs being fixed in 2.8.1, I suspect that many of these are present in 2.6.1, so it may be prudent for RR to make 2.8.x the end of life for Rev for OS9.
We're currently seven years past Apple's kill date for OS 9. Apple themselves no longer provides any patches for it, and haven't for more than half a decade.
Microsoft does not provide upgrades for W98 anymore, so by the same measure, you should also advocate for RR to abandon supporting Windows versions prior to XP. W98 is more buggy than OS9 I dare say.
Exactly how long do you feel it would be reasonable for a third-party vendor to exceed Apple's commitment to the OS they abandoned?
As I said earlier, if RR announced in due time that 2.6.1 was the last OS9 version, we could have lived with that. The only thing I would expect of them would be to retain a capability to release a OS9-specific fix should any critical bugs (yes, critical not just any bugs) need addressing later on. That simply requires keeping one computer that can produce 2.6.2 build for OS9 from the 2.6.1 codebase (or whatever the last OS9 release is).
Robert _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
