Thank you, Robert. You've got the essence, which I feel can be
summarized with a single word: "predictability".
Joe Wilkins
On May 19, 2007, at 3:57 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:
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maintaining a separate set of outdated headers, some of which may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
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