Re: Time to drop PowerPC support from our Mac binaries?

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 04:00:14PM -0700, Fyodor wrote:
> Our Mac OS X Nmap installer currently includes "universal" binaries
> which (should) work on both PowerPC and X86 architectures.  But maybe
> it is time to drop PowerPC and ship an x86-only installer instead?  It
> seems that Apple stopped selling PowerPC machines in 2006, and OS X
> versions they stopped making new operating systems available for
> PowerPC as of x86-only OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in August 2009.
>
> Going x86-only would dramatically decrease the Mac package size
> (5.99BETA1 is currently 29 megabytes).  And PowerPC users could still
> use older Nmap releases.  If they can deal with using a 5+-year-old
> machine and a 2+-year-old operating system, they can probably deal
> with using an older Nmap.
>
> Does anyone here use newer versions of Nmap on a PowerPC Mac?  Unless
> I hear a strong argument for keeping it, we'll probably remove PowerPC
> support in the next release.

I'll try doing an x86-only release. I think it is possible to build dual
x86/x86_64 binaries, but that doesn't make the build process any easier
than it is now, and wouldn't make the packages any smaller.

David Fifield
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