Is Mac PPC support now discontinued?

• Oct 26, 2011 - 07:08

Could somebody please clarify what's happening with regard to Mac PPC support?

I see that PPC support is now removed from the nightlys, but this seems to have 'just happened'. I cannot find any reference to the discontinuation of PPC support other than the note on the nightly download page that PPC is not supported, and this does not even get a mention in the nightly change logs. From my point of view a change could hardly be more major than discontinuing support of my platform.

I would be grateful if somebody could clarify the future for MuseScore on the PPC, like ... is there one?

Thanks
Steve

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• Oct 26, 2011 - 08:23

Compiling a working nightly with PPC support takes too much (human) resources on our side. So the nightly builder and myself decided to discontinued the support in nightlies for the time being. I should have communicated on the forum before, sorry for that.

MuseScore 1.1 still supports PPC. MuseScore 2.0 will eventually support PPC out of the box. In all cases, you can compile for your own platform, source code and instructions are available.

Since it's your platform, I understand you don't care much, but Mac PPC represents less than 1% of musescore.org visitors (twice less than iPad) and MacOSX 10.5 is no more supported by Apple, last update has been released on August 5, 2009 more than 2 years ago...

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• Oct 26, 2011 - 18:03

Hi

I understand your viewpoint regarding the amount of work involved to compile nightly pre-release updates for such a small percentage of your user base, and I certainly cannot disagree with the reasoning.

I have considered your suggestion of downloading the source code and compiling it myself. The instructions for how to do this are well documented and appear to be quite clear. I am not a developer, and compiling the software myself is certainly something that would be quite new to me.

However, here is my concern. Clearly the source code that has been compiled by the developers themselves does not work, I reported this just yesterday. If experienced developers cannot produce a working program then it seems to me that as a complete novice, setting up all of the necessary software and spending the hours to compile the code will at best produce my own copy of a program that does not work either. As the developers have stated that PPC is now unsupported in pre-release code I expect that reporting the fact that it will not work when I try to compile it will just fall on deaf ears. So, I have to ask, what would be the point in me doing my own compiling?

It's a bit of a disaster for me, as the bug that I most wanted to see fixed (split staff deletes notes) was actually stated as fixed on the same night that PPC support was spontaneously discontinued, so I never got the fix. Bearing in mind the sudden and unannounced decision to terminate the PPC nightlies, could I please request that maybe one more 'fixed and runnable' compile could be produced? V1.1 works nicely enough for my needs at this time, except for the Split Staff issue. If I could get one nightly copy that worked on OSX 4.5.8 PPC with the split staff fix implemented just to get me by that problem until V2 is released that would be great. Unfortunately, so far as using MuseScore is concerned, the Split Staff bug is a show-stopper for me.

It would also be nice if rather than being completely abandoned, maybe a PPC release could be produced once every few of weeks, just to keep us in the loop?

What do you think?
Thanks
Steve

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• Oct 26, 2011 - 20:01

The current nightlies are not stable enough for reliable typesetting work. Meaning, scores you make today with a nightly, may not open in tomorrows nightly. So it's wishful thinking that the nightly with save you. Harsh but it's the reality.

PPC support is not abandoned btw. It's just that with the current nightly building setup on a 10.6 machine, the maintainers lasconic and mokaspar did not find a way to build for PPC. The only way to build for PPC is with a 10.5 machine but we don't have such a Mac to our disposal to build nightlies on. So truly a it lack of resources. For the final release (1.2 or 2.0), the build will be made with a 10.5 to support PPC as well. (reiteration of what lasconic mentioned)

So if we find someone who is knowledgeable to build and has a 10.5 machine, then he can help you out.

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• Oct 26, 2011 - 20:53

I have not tried all of the nightly's released since the Split Staff fix was announced, but the newest two PPC compatibles did not work. I am happy to try them all if it helps.

Until the Split Staff fix was anoounced, I had never tried a nightly, I am a newbie here.

Steve

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• Oct 27, 2011 - 11:11

I am happy to set up my iMac to compile the code, but only if there is some hope of getting a functional version. If, as I suspect will be the case, it just crashes, will anybody be willing to support trying to resolve that?

If it is any help at all, I have a spare iMac PPC sitting around doing nothing, (it's only a G4, but it would be sufficient to prove wether a PPC release would run)It's running OSX 4.5.8, and I would be happy to set it all up to build one of the nightly releases, and also to leave it connected up and on-line with something like logmein so that if the build fails, somebody more knowledgeable than me can take it over and see what the problem is.
It has no personal data on it so it would not bother me to allow somebody to remote in with root access and do whatever they like to it, but as PPC nightlies are unsupported now, I am not sure that this is likely to be of interest.

To be honest, just for splitting the staff, I am inclined to install the windows version on a company laptop until a supported release is available for my PPC.

If having remote access to a PPC iMac is in anyway helpful please let me know, I am quite happy to set it up and leave it on line 24/7

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