On 10/22/2013 05:34 PM, Dan Wilcox wrote:
I'm not going to argue OS politics, again use what works best for you. I can understand the frustration with how the build system works on OSX. It is actually really nice in a lot of ways but it took me a while to get the hang of it after switching from Linux.

Without counting Debian, I still think there's really no need at this point to support a PPC build for OSX. When I wrote "drop PPC support" in earlier emails, I was referring only to OSX.

I understand.  It just seemed you were explaining why PPC is no longer supported as the natural outgrowth of software development progress.  I mentioned Debian both because I'm curious if anyone runs it on PPC, and also as a counter-example to the type of development model Apple uses.  (One which is able to support a much wider variety of architectures at a fraction of the cost.)

A longer discussion of OS politics is probably an unnecessary digression here: both you and I are building things in OSX, and that won't change by pointing out differences in our philosophy for why we do it.  But I just wanted to point out that "use what works for you" should expand to "use what works for you without creating a moral hazard for all of us".  One doesn't need to use the language of free software advocates in order to do that, but free software is undoubtedly part of any viable solution.

If the internet that connects all these devices weren't actively being weaponized I probably wouldn't quibble over this.

Well, I might, but it'd feel more like a pasttime and less like a necessity. :)

The code as it is now should compile just fine on Debian PPC since the only architecture differences as far as I know would be compiling for little endian versus big endian on Intel. I don't think there are any architecture specific assembly / function calls in Pd.

So in the end, dropping OSX PPC support helps in simplifying the build scripts at least. Again, I think there's really no need to host newer Pd OSX PPC binaries, just leave the last one there since anyone using it will be on a much older version of OSX anyway.

Ok, that sounds like the way to go then.

-Jonathan


On Oct 22, 2013, at 5:05 PM, pd-list-request@iem.at wrote:


Also, do you have any references for the claim that the vast majority of OSX

users have moved away from PPC?

http://update.omnigroup.com/ (Hardware / CPU type): Intel 97.8% PPC 2.2%

https://www.adium.im/sparkle/ (CPU type): Intel 97.83% PPC 2.71%

Thanks.  Those are low numbers, but I'd imagine the number of PPC users is
still fairly high:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/apple-computer-company-statistics/


I find Jobs' claim that Apple doesn't ship
junk to generally be true, and combined with their development model the
unfortunate result would seem to be that poor people still using their once
sleek and sexy devices are ignored along with their now ugly, unprofitable
devices.

Well, those "sleek and sexy" PPC devices were last made & sold in 2005, so it's not a surprise the vast majority of people using OSX have Intel machines mainly because software developers (& the OS) have moved on to 32 bit and now 64 bit intel years ago.

Debian supports PPC, no?  Anyone know how it does on the old machines?  I suppose since Pd is in the repos one could say it still supports PPC. :)


Your political bias notwithstanding (I say use what works for you),

Well, I'd call it a political stance.  And where it seemed quirky and deeply
personal when I first adopted it, it now seems simply to be a restatement
of the scientific method for computer security, at a time when there have
been revelations that show our computers really need to be as secure as
possible against attacks.

I'd also point out that yours is a political stance.  While I understand
it, I must disagree with it because in terms of security it is much more
difficult to use the scientific method to check whether the specs actually
fit the implementation.  In some cases on proprietary OSes neither are
known so you're forced to reverse engineer the software, and for
complex systems that's too time consuming and expensive to do.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika