Adium 1.5: 10.6+

[Thijs Alkemade]

On 13 mrt 2011, at 05:17, Evan Schoenberg, M.D. wrote:
> On one hand, if merges were Really Easy even with large changes, I would propose the following. I thought this possibility through prior to my initial email in this thread:
>  1. Continue work on fb-xmpp for Adium 1.4.2.
>  2. Merge this when complete to Adium 1.5.
>  3. Feature-freeze Adium 1.5.
>  4. Converge; and prepare for beta
>  5. Branch when 1.5b1 is released.  Expect minimal 1.5.x releases, as we have with 1.4.
>  6. Trunk becomes 1.6hg, which is 10.6+.
> 
> The problem with this series of steps is that Apple has dealt a hand to developers in which supporting 10.5 – or supporting PPC – means using outdated tools and technology.  Until step 6 is done, anyone who chooses to install the primary distribution of Xcode is unable to contribute to Adium (or even to build from source).  We have to ask any potential contributor to download a 4.4 GB installer (xcode 3.2.6) and install the 11.9 GB distribution as a simple prerequisite to participating.
> 
> Large feature branches are only sustainable if the trunk from which they branched stays grossly similar.  If we were to branch 1.5 at this point (maintaining, for a time, adium-1.4, adium-1.5, and adium which would be 1.6hg), we'd end up with increasingly complex merges as 1.5 and 1.6 rapidly diverged.
> 
> The outpouring of responses from developers in this thread shows the enthusiasm at being able to use modern tools and tech.

Hey all,

Although I'm a bit late to this discussion, there are still two points I'd like to mention:

- XCode 4 feels rather buggy for me. Maybe I should get used to it a bit more, but I'd rather keep using XCode 3 for a while. I don't know how well the backwards compatibility is this time, but I remember it was horrible for XCode 2 -> XCode 3. Considering that, and the €3.99 price tag, I think quite a lot of potential contributors will still be using XCode 3. The same argument also goes the other way: we don't want to require people to download an additional 5GB and spend €3.99 to be able to build.
- Just because it won't be committed to trunk doesn't make it impossible to work with blocks, or new APIs in general. I myself have been working with a fork on bitbucket on using  libdispatch for libpurple's eventloop and message view's message queues. I know this won't be pushed to trunk any time soon (if it ever will), but I don't care. Keeping this limited to feature branches makes it a lot easier to merge them back in, contrary to keeping up a "adium-1.4", "adium-1.5" and "adium-1.6". Also, that leaves the responsibility of the merge to the person working on that fork.

So, while I do agree dropping 10.5 would have advantages, and I don't really see the need to keep it around until Lion "just because", I'd rather not make this switch ASAP.

Thijs
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