Personally, I tend to think that an overly dogmatic commitment to backwards compatibility does more harm than the benefit produced by supporting a tiny minority of users with five year old hardware. Backward compatibility is the enemy of elegance. Just look at C++ or the x86 instruction set to see examples of that.
I do agree to some extent. On the other hand, I've been using Apple hardware off-and-on again since the MC68030; I already went through this with the 68k->PPC transition, then again with the introduction of the PPC750 series processors, then again with the PPC->Intel transition.
At this point, I fully expect that if I were to buy an Intel series Apple system in the next couple of years, shortly afterward Apple would switch everything over to their new A-series hardware.
I have certain investments in my current development system, too, like the early-model SSD that has made it possible for me to haul this thing around in the car to client appointments every day for the last couple of years.
I'm just sick of having perfectly good hardware that gets aged out of being able to run text editors. Yesterday, I discovered I can't run pianobar (easily) anymore because the Pandora protocol changed, MacPorts appears to be dead, and homebrew is Intel-only. (There is a PPC fork of the Intel version of homebrew, but the documentation for it is all pulled directly from the Intel fork, and I'm completely stumped at how to actually get it to work.)
On top of all that, I get to enjoy the economics of owning a device whose secondary market is falling off a cliff.
Anybody's welcome to point out all the benefits of this kind of situation -- the longevity of Apple hardware, the supposed lower TCO -- or the fact that I should be budgeting a certain amount every year towards new hardware anyway, but it's not likely to change the fact that I've been through this one too many times now and it's just not something that, to me, is worth continuing to hassle with.
I have a 2004 G5 with only one of the two processors working and I've had to replace my burned 512Mb ATI 9600 with the original 64 Mb GeForce FX 5200. I won't put this thing to the trash until its last breath.
On its left, there is a low end Dell PC running an up to date Ubuntu that cost me 350 € two years ago waiting for this day to come.
That said, MacPorts is still alive and kicking, the latest update was a few months ago.
Sweet! I'm completely unfamiliar with Ruby, which I think is half the problem (edit: and git/github, which is probably the other half). If there's a different file(s) to download for that fork, I can't find them -- everything in the github project seems to link back to https://gist.github.com/323731, which is the Intel build (edit: e.g., the Readme.md file). I tried replacing my copy of brew with https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew, but that complained that it can't find brew.h ("no such file to load -- brew.h" on line 77) ... at that point, I decided that I'd spent too much time trying to get pianobar upgraded and moved on to other things.
First, get the latest version of Xcode that's compatible with your OS. You can find older versions of Xcode by clicking on "Developer Tools" on the right side of this page: http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/w... (you may need a free Apple developer account).
sceaga has a branch for Tiger and another branch for PPC, I happened to be using Tiger on PPC, so I picked the Tiger branch. From https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew , you want to click "Switch Branches" on the left, choose your branch, then click "Download on the right. Or, just click one of these:
I opted to install into my home directory, rather than /usr/local, so to get it into place, all I had to do was extract the tarball, put the resulting directory where I wanted it (I called it "brew"), and then add $HOME/brew/bin and $HOME/brew/sbin to my $PATH.
You should now be able to type "brew" and see its usage message.
At this point, "brew install" worked for me, except that it wasn't chmodding binaries as executable. At the end of installations, it was giving a bunch of messages like "file: invalid option -- h". This appears to be because my 10.4 PPC version of "file" doesn't support "-h". To fix this, I installed the gnu version instead:
brew install libmagic
chmod +x ~/brew/Cellar/libmagic/5.04/bin/file
brew link libmagic #libmagic doesn't add gnu "file" to your PATH without this command, because it doesn't want to override the OS-provided "file"
After that, homebrew seems to work, with the following caveats:
1. "brew update" (which updates the package manager
itself) will try to update from the non-PPC, upstream
version of homebrew. I just don't use this command.
2. "brew doctor" complains that my gcc is too old
(because I can't use the latest Xcode) and can't
seem to detect that I have X11 installed, even
though I do.
I've also found the people in #machomebrew on irc.freenode.net to be a helpful bunch, although not many have experience with homebrew on PPC.
You were my favorite non-girlfriend-or-business-partner person today!
I had a busy day so I didn't get to try this out until just now. Somehow, despite staring at the github project page and clicking on everything that I thought was clickable and grinding my teeth in frustration, I never noticed the "Downloads" button. So now I feel like an idiot, but I'm an idiot with a working homebrew. Thank you. :-)
Whoops; for the record, "file" is not written by GNU. It was originally written by Ian Darwin and is currently maintained by Christos Zoulas, see http://www.darwinsys.com/file/
It's understandable that you wouldn't want to buy a new Mac just before they do a hardware refresh or something, but come on. At some point you need a new computer. Somehow I doubt that Apple is going to do some kind of crazy Intel -> Atom transition anytime soon, and even if they do they'll support Intel for at least a few years.
You sound like my friend who won't upgrade to an HDTV "because the price keeps dropping." :D
Like I said, it's not necessarily a rational decision, it's just that the pain of being invested into a platform only to have it become completely unsupported way before I'm ready to spend money on the Next! Great! New! Thing! has been burned into my brain. It's just not a hassle I need to deal with, not when I'm equally comfortable in Windows, Debian, or Mac.
It might be understandable if this was some kind of resource-hungry multimedia application, but a text editor? Like you say, "come on".
Also, Apple is notorious for wanting to own as much of their vertical as possible. They hate dealing with other companies for critical components, especially processors. They've become quite good at the processor transition at this point, and now that they own their own microprocessor and are using it in all of their mobile devices -- and touting the superior benefits of their processor every chance they get -- I'd be willing to make a pretty big bet that moving at least their entire laptop line over to the A series processors is already on their development roadmap.
I think the writing's on the proverbial wall and, like I said, I'm just tired of getting caught by it every time it happens.
