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

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 13:03, Christian Schoenebeck
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

Dead code is always a maintenance burden, even if it's not a very
large one. It means that somebody reading the code and working
on it has to think "maybe I need to do something to cater for these older
versions in my new feature I'm working on, maybe I need to test on
older versions" when they don't. It makes code harder to read when
it's got a bunch of ifdefs in 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.

But is anybody actually going to fix pre-10.12 support? They've
had six months so far... If we had a good sized body of developers
taking active care of how well QEMU on OSX works, I would be
entirely happy for them to decide amongst themselves what they
thought was a reasonable version support policy for OSX. But
we just don't.

I wouldn't object to a configure check if anybody wanted to write
a patch to add one.

> > "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

Indeed, and none of those is the 10.11-and-earlier that this patch
drops attempts to cater for. The patch does still keep 10.12 and
10.13 support alive, even though it's not strictly required by
our support policy, because building for those host versions does
in practice still work.

thanks
-- PMM