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

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

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.

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.
"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.

thanks
-- PMM