Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

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Vezzra
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Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#1 Post by Vezzra »

Important news on the OSX dev front:

Today I finally got around to set up an OSX 10.9 test install plus Xcode5/clang dev environment for FO on an external hard drive. After a bit fiddling around I've been able to successfully build FO with this setup.

That's a major breakthrough. As far as I remember, Adrian had been trying a couple of things a while ago to get rid of the issues that prevented that so far (troubles with adobe::t_name among them, IIRC), looks like these attempts have been successful.

I had to change some important settings although, the most critical one being that I had to raise the deployment platform to OSX 10.7. Meaning, in theory, that the FO app package being built requires at least OSX 10.7 or later to run. However, I have been able to launch the FO app I built with Xcode5 on 10.9 on 10.6 nevertheless, so it looks like we should be able to maintain 10.6 compatibility even if we switch the SDK to 10.9 and Xcode5 (at least for a while). I still have to run some tests before I'm going to upgrade my system and the SDK, but so far things look promising.

That means (besides finally being able to upgrade the OSX dev environment to current OSX and Xcode versions), as far as OSX is concerned, we should now be able to make use of some C++11 features. Once we do that though, we'll very likely won't be able to maintain 10.6 compatibility anymore.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Vezzra wrote:Once we do that though, we'll very likely won't be able to maintain 10.6 compatibility anymore.
Is maintaining OSX 10.6 compatibility important? I'm not familiar with how common it is to use several-iterations old versions of OSX... Presumably it's not quite so common as Windows XP still is, for example?

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Vezzra
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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#3 Post by Vezzra »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Is maintaining OSX 10.6 compatibility important? I'm not familiar with how common it is to use several-iterations old versions of OSX... Presumably it's not quite so common as Windows XP still is, for example?
Maybe moderately important. You're probably right, it might be already less common than XP, it's certainly only a minority that still runs 10.6.

However, OS updates on Mac are far more frequent than on Windows PCs, once a year, and I very much doubt that the majority of Mac users upgrades their system every year (these upgrades certainly are not hassle-free). So it's generally a good idea to try to maintain compatibility as far back as possible. After all, 10.6 is just four years old (IIRC), and it irks me quite a bit that I won't be able to maintain compatibility with a four year old OS... :(

That said, if there are good reasons to start using C++11, maintaining backward compatibility with 10.6 shouldn't keep us from doing that.

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#4 Post by Bigjoe5 »

I wasn't able to find results that single out OS X, but these statistics indicate that just under 18% of OS X users are still on 10.6.
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adrian_broher
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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#5 Post by adrian_broher »

Vezzra wrote:After all, 10.6 is just four years old (IIRC), and it irks me quite a bit that I won't be able to maintain compatibility with a four year old OS... :(
Vezzra, while your intend to is honorable please keep in mind that Apple has pretty much put the Snow Leopard support to 'end-of-life' as they provide updates for more recent versions of OSX but left out the distribution of similar updates for 10.6. If the creator of the software in question itself has abandoned support it is a good indicator we should do the same.
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Vezzra
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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#6 Post by Vezzra »

adrian_broher wrote:Vezzra, while your intend to is honorable please keep in mind that Apple has pretty much put the Snow Leopard support to 'end-of-life' as they provide updates for more recent versions of OSX but left out the distribution of similar updates for 10.6. If the creator of the software in question itself has abandoned support it is a good indicator we should do the same.
Yeah, I know. I really can't argue that point ;) But that doesn't mean I've to like it. As much as I like Apple's platform in general, there are many policies of that company that really annoy me (to put it politely), Apple's habit of abandoning support for technologies that have been introduced only a few years ago is one of them :x

Anyway, it's not that Apple leaves us much choice on the matter. So I agree, we shouldn't go to too much lengths to support an OS which isn't even supported by the company that created it anymore. If employing C++11 features really can make things easier/better, by all means, lets go for it.

Still, if the statistics Bigjoe linked to are representative, we will be cutting loose almost 20% of the Mac user base. That's considerable...

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Re: Building FO with Xcode5/clang on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

#7 Post by MatGB »

Vezzra wrote: Still, if the statistics Bigjoe linked to are representative, we will be cutting loose almost 20% of the Mac user base.
From using future releases until such time as they're able to upgrade. The game as is is perfectly playable, maybe do it after the next stable release so that they have a decent build for the foreseeable?
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