Well the poll results demonstrate why i created the poll and this thread - we’re hovering around a 50/50 split of opinion on the matter
@B S Magnet.
What I can gather is this has been stewing out of sight, as I haven’t posted anything in many months about the direction and scope of the project — not since someone new came in, claimed they got a remarkable thing to work, but then declined to document how they did it. Yah, that didn’t sit right with me, I said as much, and I left it at that. I’ll expand on that a bit below.
After that, I went on to focus on other Mac (and life and work) things. That was several months ago, and this new thread is, well, new
now.
As for the original thread being derailed, that’s a subjective opinion. Even in the first month of the project we discussed that at some point paths would diverge into a 10A096 with Leopard components and a 10A190/10A222… with updated components. The original thread was never dedicated to either path in particular. It was a thread for SL_PPC as
@Larsvonhier coined it.
Once you volunteered to be responsible for the WikiPost on that thread detailing all of the steps needed and which components from Leopard were required to tweak and improve 10A096, and then gave the project a nickname ‘Clouded Leopard’ it started to become clear that there was no longer space for both paths in one thread, particularly as your focus was solely on 10A096. This was compounded with MacPorts related posts entering the fray with
@kencu followed by
@barracuda156.
OK.
My focus being on 10A96 was not a distraction from folks testing and updating the wikipost for 10A190, and I repeated this regularly, noting I was the oddball working with 10A96 and wasn‘t offended by being alone with that. I
wanted — hoped — folks would do the same with 10A190 as I had done with 10A96.
I continued adding new information related to 10A96, such as in
Table 4, because that was what
I was working on. I was not in a place or position to do the same for 10A190, but many others
were.
I took up the voluntary mantle of maintaining the wikipost’s format and readability because no one else stepped up to do so. What
was there back in 2020 was quickly devolving into a poorly edited wiki which so often undermines the utility of other, complex, lengthy wikiposts found elsewhere on MR (most notably, by folks whose professional backgrounds probably aren’t adjacent to or are in technical writing/documentation).
I didn’t fault anyone for not contributing to the testing of 10A190 and not updating the 10A190 column for verified functionality. It would have been nice for someone to be doing what I was doing on the 10A190 side,
but that didn’t happen.
I don’t think it is OK to fault me on behalf of others who chose not to do that component/QA testing work on 10A190, to update folks in the ongoing discussion or in the wikipost on those component swaps.
Even as many others were trying out 10A190 on their gear (totally OK by me, always), I didn’t press others to step up to do the same for 10A190 or even later builds as I had been doing for 10A96. The column in
Table 4 was already there, waiting for someone working on 10A190 to fill it in. The occasional post notwithstanding, particularly throughout 2020, that generally did not happen.
But — and this is key — I have always expected a level of
quality, transparency, and clarity with communication to make sure documentation for what had been tested
was available and accessible to all, and in a human-readable presentation/format. That no one took up that mantle with 10A190 or reported on swapped components which worked (or didn’t)
is on those who worked on 10A190.
I’m sorry. Your grievance here is unfair. And a great deal of what you’ve brought up above isn’t even central to to the Snow Leopard itself.
That was the remit, after all: a PowerPC Mac owner who wants to install, try out, and even run Snow Leopard on their PowerPC Mac. They want it to work, and if it works, to find ways to make the OS work better (i.e., fewer crashes, bugs, getting AirPort to play nice, etc.).
Macports? Respectfully, that should have always been spun off to another thread about — wait for it — Macports on an unsupported OS
back in late 2021. It originally came up in 2020 while folks were still trying out third-party software to see which ones worked and which did not.
The three of us discussed divergence and agreed that MacPorts needed its own thread and that it wasn’t a fundamental part of the OS, even if third party software compatibility had been discussed from the get go, but also that the three of us, as the only active, consistent testers and contributors working on SL_PPC systems for a long period of time had become an ‘adhoc team’ and that sharing findings together remained the best course of action.
With candour, what wore me out —
burnt me out — from continuing beyond mid-2022 was the steady abundance of Macports-related posts being nearly all of my alerts whenever a new post on SL-PPC came up.
It got to a point when I was, like, “What even is this anymore?”
From the remit of all the things central to making Snow Leopard run smoothly for the way most folks use OS X, each “Oh, this is about Macports again” became a distraction. Less wheat, more chaff. But by then, my expressed suggestion, to spin off non-Snow Leopard stuff over to another thread, was rebuffed by the very party generating the content which was ancillary to the remit of getting SL to run on PowerPC Macs. [!]
The work they did was and is laudable, and — this is key —
it always belonged in its own topical place. I couldn’t twist their arm to go open a new thread on Macports in the Darwin 10.0.0dX environment. I found this frustrating, but really: what more could I do?
So… more drift away from the project’s central remit on the SL-PPC thread continued apace, and I reached a point, like around June 2022, when I was just, “OK, I can’t with this anymore.” Moreoever, few contributions to areas in the wikipost reserved for 10A190 had been added by anyone to in quite some time, despite most user activity on the thread being focussed on 10A190/10.0.0d2 matters. 🤷♀️
We then took a respite. I continued to quietly compile and tinker off thread when I found the time,
@barracuda156 continued to share MacPorts on 10A190 progress in his own threads (admittedly sometimes in the wrong thread) and
@educovas appeared with a 10A222 build and was working on a 10A432 build using components from 10A190.
Excitement ensued. People became active and vocal again, and then demands and disagreements emerged.
The consensus is not clear but the objections to technical posts being posted on that thread and its confusing nature for newcomers is clearly an issue, made clear by multiple users now. The fact that it has always been a technical thread is irrelevant at this point - it is no longer easy to follow for the whole of the community.
It’s no longer easy to follow for the reason I just raised: the Macports stuff always belonged with another thread germane to the third-party Macports project, to keep the original remit of the SL-PPC thread focussed on Snow Leopard itself.
To newcomers, the thread, particularly from 2022, appeared preoccupied not so much with Snow Leopard, but with Macports. Feature creep? Project drift? Whatever. It happened.
@educovas left that original thread and continued to work with a select group of people, testing and putting together a 10.6.8 build which was then shared on that thread for posterity. The build was apparently tested on multiple systems and by multiple people and was done outside of the scope of that project. This build has been volunteered to the community ‘as is’.
Good on him!
I was clear from the outset on the need for transparency and clear communication, in order for others to be able to repeat what he asserted he had accomplished. (I certainly wanted to repeat what he did, and for a minute, I thought I might get much more involved again.) This is the bedrock and cornerstone of good (scientific) method and peer review.
Software engineering is still science.
He wasn‘t interested in that, and so he left.
Unlike others, I wasn’t so much dazzled by his breakthroughs as I was sceptical, so long as there wasn’t a way for anyone else to replicate, openly, what he was doing. This isn’t to argue any of it was fabiricated, but we needed (and, frankly, deserved) a way for other folks to walk through how he did it by having the ability to replicate it ourselves. A black box tack wasn’t it.
And yes, I’m kind of a stickler for openness over proprietary behaviour. As humans, we work at our very best when we share and collaborate together, not when we withhold and compete against one another.
This brings us back to the poll and this thread.
I’m happy to go in either direction, but i will continue on the same path that was outlined in my first post in 2020 - building and testing system components from AOSP with a view to patching a build (now 10.6.8) to be as close to the retail version as possible.
Cool, and I’m glad you’re doing that and that that’s still your area of focus and interest. I hope I haven’t gotten in your way of that.
Also bear in mind, from the vantage of others, the AOSP work you were doing seemed to set about getting, say, something like Build 10A222 to boot fully and pull up a working Finder and WindowServer on a PowerPC box. Or, in the case of 10A190 elements, like frameworks or kexts, which were broken for PowerPC, compiling from the AOSP source might mend those broken bits.
And now, with some hindsight, I’m under the impression it wasn’t so much about that than it was to build AOSP elements for PowerPC operability in a Darwin 10.0.0dX environment, without specific attention to make a broken bits in particular build, like 10A190 or 10A222, to work better. Please correct me on that.
If the community would like development in this thread only then we will encourage all development discussions related to the OS itself to be posted here and provide a comprehensive wiki, toolkit and references.
Here’s the thing:
"Snow Leopard on Unsupported PowerPC Macs”, per the original post before it became a wiki, didn’t set out to be a thread about software development or building toolchains. It certainly didn’t bring up a third-party repo. But that’s where it went nevertheless. It was about getting Snow Leopard to boot up and to run on a PowerPC Mac.
It seemed a clear remit: “10A190? Yes, mostly. 10A96? Yes, but very early. 10A222? WindowServer and Finder aren’t happy.”
It is a community decision and the outcome will be respected.
I… I just find it curious how you’ve gone forward
right now with this thread/poll/wikipost, unprompted, even as — by shared measures — you don’t favour creating a thread like this in the first place. It reads to me as slightly hostile, even if that isn’t the intent. This line alone comes across as very, “Sir, yes sir” as the only valid response, and it’s a line I couldn’t have said (something-something-about-gendered-allowances-etc.)
I also find it curious this is coming up
right now and not, say, quite some time ago, back when I was still heavily involved with getting Snow Leopard running smoothly on PowerPC Macs. And although I’m not going to take this personally, I do gather the tenor of your comments here — including the lol emoji — feel awfully personal by nature. (Or maybe that’s a total misread, idk.) If you
have had a grievance with me, there’s been nothing here which couldn’t have been brought up with direct, person-to-person communiction (i.e., pm).
Anyhow, I’m not actively involved in the main project and I haven’t been for a while. It’s never meant I lost interest, but I did grow tired for the aforementioned reasons of project drift/creep. I would like to return to it again (because I like using Snow Leopard as a “regular driver” on my fastest available PPC Mac). And when I do so, my focus will resume on the basic remit laid out in the original post by Lars and early replies by vddrnnr.
But if you take umbrage with me as a person, then this is not the place for it.
p.s., The poll’s data would be more effective with checkboxes, not radio buttons.
