Really bummed to see no support for my still beautiful and highly capable 27 inch iMac. Just because apple decides to force me to buy a new computer to use their latest OS doesn’t mean you guys should follow suite.
For me as an amateur mac programmer I know that supporting older hardware is just a few button clicks away, when you already supported the last revision. I will now have to endeavor to compile Kicad and that will probably take me days to weeks to figure out all the nuances of your compilation.
Available programming cycles are always the limit. Supporting what Apple won’t support is not gonna be high on the list. There are already important features lacking that programmers can’t get too. But, if you want to maintain a release by doing those couple of clicks I’m sure the developers would welcome your help.
I tried for days to compile 6.0 a while back and was never successful. The few clicks I’m talking about is after you’ve already downloaded, setup and configured gigabytes of code and libraries to run the latest and now want to maintain the backwards compatibility. I’d be willing to bet the KiCad developers had 6.99 running on macOS10.12 before they figured out changes needed for 10.13. Figuring out apples latest (especially code signing) is hard but KiCad is already doing all that. Management flipped the off switch.
We discovered we cannot make a build on macOS 11 (the minimum required for us to support arm64) that will run on 10.15 or earlier. So, we had to drop support for 10.15 prebuilts. We prioritize supporting newer (supported by Apple) versions.
We expect that the maintainer of the macports kicad package will probably release 7.0 on macports at some point, and then users on older macOS versions will be able to install it from there.
I’m not sure what this statement means, but we try to change what version we are building on as rarely as possible, because it always takes days or weeks of work to fix issues anytime Apple releases an update.
Sorry, my problem is with apple, not you guys. I’m thankful to you all that V6.0 runs great on my iMac and that KiCad will run great on apples arm64 machines.