Re: Need test of patch for OS X

[Alexander Hansen]

> On May 10, 2016, at 14:39, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 05/10/2016 05:25 PM, Alexander Hansen wrote:
> 
>> Here are some additional links besides what Marius just sent out.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
>> My understanding based on
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2339679/what-are-the-differences-between-so-and-dylib-on-osx
>>  is
>> that current OS X versions should allow dylibs to be dlopen()ed and
>> dlclose()d if they aren’t using the older API.
> 
> Oh, this is news to me, but is definitely good news because we are currently 
> detecting and using the old dylib interface for the octave_shlib class 
> (NSLinkModule, NSLookupSymbolInModule, etc.) and it would be so much simpler 
> if we could delete the support for that interface and just use dlopen, dlsym, 
> and dlsearch like we do on other Unixy systems.
> 
> Can we do that?  Is the stackoverflow answer correct about the OS X version 
> where dlopen and dlclose are both supported?  What is the oldest OS X version 
> we care about supporting?
> 
> jwe
> 

I believe that 10.5 was indeed where that transition occurred—based on memory, 
though.

As for the oldest OS X version to support, there are cases to be made for:

* 10.5, since that’s the last OS X version which supported PowerPC, and some 
folks still are interested.
* 10.6, since I believe that’s the oldest version where an Oracle JDK can be 
installed, if you don’t want to have to worry about also supporting Apple’s 
Java 1.6 framework.
* 10.7, since that’s where Apple changed over to clang/clang++ as the C/C++ 
compiler.  Apple’s 1.6 Java became optional at this point.
* 10.9, since there was a C++ ABI change from libstdc++ to libc++ as the 
default at that point.

—akh