Re: macOS support (was: bug#30800: 26.0.91; unknown crash on macos)

[Tim Cross]

I don't think we are doing users any favours by providing long backwards compatibility for OS versions, especially if that comes at the cost of code clarity, maintainability and feature stability. There have been some significant security patches applied to later versions of OSX. I'm not suiggesting we immediately drop support for earlier versions, but 10.6 was released in 2009 - a 9 to 10 year backwards compatibility is probably excessive - 5 years would probably be a better target. 

On 26 March 2018 at 07:08, David Reitter <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mar 24, 2018, at 2:35 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> Are there any numbers about how widespread each version is on end-user
> machines?

Better, I can show you the number of unique (and somewhat frequent) Aquamacs Emacs users throughout 2017, below.
(Some of them will have upgraded throughout the year, so they would be counted multiple times.)

In these data, we’re seeing that out of all users, only 2.15% are still on Mac OS X 10.6.  (Full distribution shown below.)

If we do the same for November and December 2017 only.  Now we’re down to 1.21% and 1.24% 10.6 users, respectively.

Looking at queries (which run every third day, as long as Emacs is in use):  Out of the Dec 2017 queries (838) from machine that still run 10.6, only 6% (54) bothered to upgrade to the latest version, which was released in mid-2016.  Clearly, users of very old operating systems also don’t care to upgrade their Emacs.

Now, there are some old Macs that can only run 10.6.  However, clearly, few users will update applications but not never the OS.

I hope these data can support your decision where to direct scarce volunteer resources.



[aquamacs /home/protected]$ ./macos-users v2017
unique users with more than 10 startups:
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard:
    1074
OS X 10.7 Lion:
     776
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion:
     726
OS X 10.9 Mavericks:
    2631
OS X 10.10 Yosemite:
    5418
OS X 10.11 El Capitan:
   11526
macOS 10.12 Sierra:
   20594
macOS 10.13 High Sierra:
    7116
—
Total 49861

--

regards,

Tim

--

Tim Cross