Transitioning to 10.6 as the Mac build platform
Mark Mentovai
beginning the transition to Mac OS X 10.6 as the supported Mac
development platform. We’ve actually supported developing on 10.6 for
a while, but various factors have tied us to maintaining support for
10.5 as a development platform as well, and all of our official builds
were produced on 10.5.
10.6 allows us to solve the linker address space problem because it
uses Xcode 3.2, which bundles an ld that can run in 64-bit mode. This
should get us past the address space exhaustion problems we experience
with the 32-bit-only linker bundled with Xcode 3.1. 3.1 is the latest
version of Xcode to run on 10.5.
If you’re currently developing on 10.5, note that we won’t
intentionally do anything to break your build, but as many developers
have already begun to experience linker address space exhaustion
problems in their debug-mode builds, it would be prudent to move to
10.6 at your earliest convenience. 10.6 has been out for 10 months,
and most developers would prefer to use it as their primary platform
anyway. At some point, several weeks after we’ve transitioned all of
our official builds to 10.6, we’ll undo some of the band-aids that
have kept the 10.5 builds limping along.
Also, if you’re doing Mac development, you can now consider 10.6 the
canonical nib format. I’ll convert our checked-in nibs later today.
All builds done on 10.6 will use the 10.5 SDK (as they always have),
and we’ve verified that these builds behave properly on 10.5. We
aren’t dropping runtime support for 10.5. This change only affects the
development platform.
We’ve begun the process to move our Mac waterfall and try-server
builders over to Mac OS X 10.6. Some of the Mac tryservers have
already moved to 10.6. The transition will probably take a couple of
weeks. Despite this change, we’ll be maintaining full test coverage on
10.5.
I’d like to specifically thank Bev Cristobal for her ongoing work with
the buildbots to assist us with this change, and Tom Van Lenten for
poring over builds done on 10.5 and 10.6 to verify that they are, in
fact, identical and using the proper SDK bits.
Mark