[cmake-developers] Drop support for older Xcode versions?

[Eric Wing]

On 2/9/16, Davy Durham <ddurham at davyandbeth.com> wrote:
> I'll say that in my line of work, we still have to support OS X 10.6
> (just dropped 10.5 support) .. And we're doing this at Apple's own
> request/demand!  It's not fun.  I've had to hack tools around to get
> somewhat newer tool chains to continue to work, but it's been /great/
> that cmake hasn't been an obstacle in this endeavour.

Supporting 10.6...this is what I'm referring to. In Apple's world,
this means you are on 10.11 using Xcode 7.3 and setting the Deployment
target to 10.6.

I know for hard cases, it is never that simple, but do you really need
to be on 10.6 to develop for 10.6?

A corollary issue is that when you buy a new Mac, it usually can't
boot an operating system older than the one it shipped with. Backwards
compatibility is hard. This suggests two alternative paths:

- CMake archives older versions. You can always download the last
official supported version for CMake that runs on 10.6.

- We split the Xcode generators into per-version buckets. (Xcode 3, 4,
5, 6, 7). Work freezes on older generators after awhile, but hopefully
won't break. (Yeah, I know core CMake changes can get dicey, which is
why I didn't really want to suggest this.)

Anyway food for thought.