Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
- Subject: Re: Tips to deploy applications to multiple Mac OS X versions
- From: "Michael Ash" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:11:33 -0400
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Steve Christensen <email@hidden> wrote:
> > > And unhappy programmers. My estimate is that supporting 10.3-10.5
> increases my development + testing + bug-fixing time increases by a factor
> of 1.5 over what it would be if it was 10.5 only, plus the penalty that I
> simply forego some features which are not practical to implement or disable
> in 10.3, and not worth the time to split off into my "Tiger" bundle.
> > >
> > > I recommend that you explain to your requirments guru(s) the high cost
> of 10.3-10.5 support and ask them to reconsider if you really need to do
> this, Lorenzo.
> > >
> >
>
> The "unhappy programmers" part is really irrelevant. If your user base is
> distributed among a reasonable set of OS versions, why should they be
> foreced to upgrade to the latest OS just so your workload is smaller? For
> example, I would think you'd expect to be supporting Tiger for some time
> yet, just because of the percentage of users who have it installed...
Taking this logic to its extreme, you should ensure that your
application works all the way back to 10.0. There must be somebody out
there who's still using it, after all.
Back to reality, the "unhappy programmers" part is completely
relevant, it's just badly phrased. Better phrasing is to state that
programmer effort is limited and putting that effort into supporting
older OSes stops being an effective investment at a certain point.
Exactly how far back to go will depend on your available time and the
distribution of your users, but it would be a perfectly rational
decision today to decide that you will be Leopard-only, because you'll
provide more benefit to your users by concentrating on that than you
would by allowing them to continue using Tiger.
Certainly you should support older OSes when you can, but programmer
time is the most precious resource you have, and managing it
effectively is the key element when making this sort of decision.
Mike
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