Bumping minimum macOS deployment target

[zorgiepoo]

Since Xcode 14 is raising the minimum supported deployment to macOS 10.13, we will need to raise it from 10.11 -> 10.13. The only question of doing this is when (ideally, to a release that aligns with Xcode 14 stable being released).

[ychin]

Hi @zorgiepoo I'm curious but where does it say that Xcode 14 requires 10.13? I tried this out locally and while the GUI seems to require 10.13, if you build using the command line, setting MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to lower versions still seem to work. I built MacVim locally with Xcode 14 beta using xcodebuild and MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9 and it still works.

I'm asking because MacVim currently targets 10.9, and hence we are going to be stuck on Sparkle 1 for the foreseeable future (since Sparkle 2 requires 10.11), but I think unnecessarily bumping to 10.13 would make it even harder to make a switch to Sparkle 2 (A bump from 10.9 to 10.13 is a lot, especially since 10.9 - 10.11 had the same system requirement, but 10.12 and 10.13 dropped olded Macs).

If there are particularly new technology that had to be set to deploy against 10.13 I understand, but just want to make sure it's not just because of a misunderstanding.

On a side note, what's the rationale for Sparkle 2 requiring 10.11? I tried to look through the issues but didn't see any descriptions why that was the case.

[ychin]

Hmm when you compile using xcodebuild it does complain about it:

warning: The macOS deployment target 'MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET' is set to 10.9, but the range of supported deployment target versions is 10.13 to 13.1.

I wonder if this is a hard warning or just a "you should consider updating" thing.

[zorgiepoo]

It's in the Xcode 14 release notes that Xcode 14 cannot deploy back further than 10.13 (or it's unsupported, rather). There is even an Xcode table on this which notes which versions of Xcode supports building apps that deploy to which OS versions. The last time this happened was when Xcode 12 raised the minimum deployable OS from 10.6 to 10.9.

It's very likely gated by technical reasons and that Xcode needs to have some support for backwards-deploying that goes beyond a mere version setting. You'd be on the safe side to assume binaries built on Xcode 14 are incompatible below 10.13 regardless of trying to force MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

Sparkle 2.0 had APIs I wanted to use that were 10.11+ only, and then eventually 2.1 used even more APIs that were 10.11+ only. Now as you can see this is moot because Xcode is going to force 10.13+ only binaries anyway. Using older versions of Sparkle or software when you need to support older OS versions is a fine strategy, but eventually requirements raise on the newer versions.. Personally speaking, I think 10.13 is pretty far back although it doesn't matter what I think in this specific case. (Even if this issue was cosmetic and not technical, I can't justify to have Sparkle ignore project deployment warnings like that.)

[ychin]

Ugh you are right. Thanks for pointing it out.

But yes 10.13 is old, but some of my users just refuse to upgrade 😅. We will think about what to do on our side.