[R-pkg-devel] Minimum macOS version ?

[Simon Urbanek]

Dirk,

the minimum required version for the high-sierra build is 10.13 and for big-sur build is 11.0 (as the names imply). Although it is not unrealistic to move Intel to macOS 10.14, it would be more problematic to move to 10.15 since it is the version that killed 32-bit support so 10.14 is actually more prevalent than 10.15 as a lot of users will never upgrade due to that loss. Given that Intel binaries are there only to support legacy hardware it's unlikely to move forward much more (i.e. I can see the immediate argument saying that those macOS version are unsupported, but so are the machines running them, but that doesn't mean R users won't use them).

What exactly do you need the higher macOS versions for? Generally, there were no major changes in the Mach-O format recently, so it shouldn't really matter - the main difference would be SDK/run-time - are there  specific features you require? Some of it could be addressed by providing more recent run-times separately - that's why I'm asking.

Cheers,
Simon


> On 9/12/2022, at 9:19 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> One package I stand behind as maintainer does
> 
>  ## Take care of 10.14 requirement for Intel macOS
>  if test x"${uname}" = x"Darwin" -a x"${machine}" = x"x86_64"; then
>      AC_MSG_CHECKING([for Darwin x86_64 use minimum version override])
>      CXX17_MACOS="-mmacosx-version-min=10.14"
>      AC_MSG_RESULT([${CXX17_MACOS}])
>  fi
> 
> We now contemplate going to 10.15 as minimum macOS version. Is that an issue
> for CRAN?
> 
> Apologies for the somewhat ignorant question but I was not aware where I
> could have looked this up. So thanks in advance for any pointers.
> 
> Thanks,  Dirk
> 
> -- 
> dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org
> 
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