Re: [PATCH] ui/cocoa: Drop workarounds for pre-10.12 OSX

[Christian Schoenebeck <qemu_oss@crudebyte.com>]

On Dienstag, 4. Februar 2020 11:15:36 CET Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Feb 2020 at 19:59, G 3 <programmingkidx@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Our official OSX support policy covers the last two released versions.
> >> Currently that is 10.14 and 10.15.  We also may work on older versions,
> >> but
> >> don't guarantee it.
> >> 
> >> In commit 50290c002c045280f8d in mid-2019 we introduced some uses of
> >> CLOCK_MONOTONIC which incidentally broke compilation for pre-10.12 OSX
> >> versions (see LP:1861551). We don't intend to fix that, so we might
> >> as well drop the code in ui/cocoa.m which caters for pre-10.12
> >> versions as well. (For reference, 10.11 fell out of Apple extended
> >> security support in September 2018.)
> >> 
> >> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> >> ---
> >> The bug report is recent, but this was also pointed out on
> >> the mailing list back in June 2019. Since nobody has cared
> >> to try to fix it, we clearly don't care about 10.11 in
> >> practice as well as in theory.]
> > 
> > Why would you want to inconvenience the Mac users? This is unacceptable.
> > I and many other Mac users would not be able to use the newer versions of
> > QEMU anymore. Keeping Mac OS 10.10 and up support doesn't seem like a
> > burden. This patch should not be applied.

Not that I really care, but I also wonder whether that would be an appropriate 
action to remove this code, as it does not seem to impose anything negative to 
retain it.

> The rationale is in the commit message -- QEMU *already* does not
> build on 10.11, and it has not done so for more than six months, and
> none of these Mac users has submitted a patch to try to fix it.

How about handling this with an error message at configure stage instead? 
Removing this code does not increase the chance for somebody going to fix 
pre-10.12 support.

> "Last two versions only" is our support policy for OSX for a reason,
> and the reason is that there just aren't very many people running
> OSX and actively working on QEMU. Of those, even fewer will
> be still running OSX versions that are no longer being supported
> for security fixes by Apple.

Apple currently seems to maintain 4 macOS release branches with security fixes 
(10.15.x, 10.14.x, 10.13.x, 10.12.x):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra#Release_history

Best regards,
Christian Schoenebeck