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Re: Cross OS version UB development
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Re: Cross OS version UB development


  • Subject: Re: Cross OS version UB development
  • From: Shawn Erickson <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:31:15 -0800


On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Laurence Harris wrote:


On Feb 24, 2007, at 11:05 AM, Syd Polk wrote:

First of all, just because you can build for earlier OS versions does not
alleviate the burden of testing for those OS versions.


Hi people,

What's the earliest OS I can cross compile for OS versions?
Right now
I'm using these settings.

SDKROOT = /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.9.sdk
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_i386 = 10.4
SDKROOT_i386 = /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk

Now, what if I wanted to let PPC users run my library on MacOS 10.2?
Is this possible? Whats the earliest OS I can cross compile for? I'd
rather know than test it out for myself because I don't
actually have MacOS10.2 or 10.1 or 10.0 installed.

Granted, I don't know what kind of library you want to write or what it involves, but in general I would expand on Syd's comment and say you'd be crazy to try supporting any version of the OS you don't have available for testing *and* debugging. You're probably assuming that your only concern would be to ensure you don't call any APIs that weren't available in earlier versions when running under those versions, but assumptions are evil.


Every release of Mac OS X contains fixes for bugs in previous versions of Mac OS X. It's not hard at all to write code that works correctly on 10.4 and *should* work correctly on 10.2, but doesn't because of a bug in 10.2 that's since been fixed. This is true for any two versions of Mac OS X, of course, but the farther back you go the buggier Mac OS X gets and the probabilities of you being bitten by this increase as a result.

I fully second this... you will hit issues with code that runs perfectly fine on 10.4 but fails in some fashion (from simple cosmetic issues to crashing) on prior versions of Mac OS X. So you really need to test on all operating systems you plan to target or at a minimum fully test on the earliest version of Mac OS X that you are targeting and do spot testing on later versions (forward compatibility is less likely to bite you but problems will still pop up).


-Shawn
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References: 
 >RE: Cross OS version UB development (From: "Syd Polk" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Cross OS version UB development (From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>)

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