As a blanket answer that may be true as that’s not the goal of the project, but technically, it’s totally possible depending on what you’re building. In the end, it’s all just C/C++ libraries you *could* download and build yourself.
The same is true for different versions of Linux distros.
Anyway, I’ll stop talking technical then agree that you probably can’t build for a 10+ year old OSX version on a contemporary one, at least with the amount & type of dependencies you are dealing with. That being said, if it’s easy for people to build it themselves, then it’s simpler to focus on putting out a binary with more recent compatibility like 10.8+. The vast majority of OSX users are using 10.8+.
My test builds of vanilla for OSX seem to work fine back to 10.8. I need to do some more testing to figure out what details I’m missing for it to work on 10.6 & 10.7, but then I’d need a computer running either of those at hand… maybe not worth it since people can much more easily build vanilla for themselves if/when they need to.
Dan Wilcox @danomatika https://twitter.com/danomatika danomatika.com http://danomatika.com/ robotcowboy.com http://robotcowboy.com/
On Oct 10, 2016, at 2:10 PM, Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com wrote:
You’ll probably need to build form source in either environment if you want to be sure of the deployment target. Both Homebrew and Macports are focused on running OS software for the current system, much less so for building baked libraries to run on other systems.
From #machomebrew on freenode:
[13:50] <doubting_thomas> does homebrew support building packages on OSX 10.11 for an earlier version of OSX, like 10.6? [13:51] <doubting_thomas> well, i guess i should say earlier _versions_, like compatible with 10.6 and up... [14:36] <tdsmith> doubting_thomas: no [15:01] <doubting_thomas> tdsmith: thanks. [15:05] <tdsmith> doubting_thomas: sorry, yw
-Jonathan