Homebrew
macOS 12 unsupported? #5603
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Replies: 2 comments 19 replies
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The current latest macOS 12.x version, 12.7.6, is expected to be the last update for Monterey. macOS 15 releases on Monday alongside macOS 13.7 and macOS 14.7 and Apple support only 3 macOS versions at a time (so 13, 14 & 15). We too only have CI testing resources to support 3 macOS versions. We've reallocated our macOS 12 CI to be macOS 15 yesterday. |
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Can you point to announcements they've made in the past about dropping support? When and where did they announce that Big Sur was no longer supported? |
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Apple doesn't make announcements about dropping support. They just stop shipping updates. As @Bo98 said: Apple's policy on this has been consistent for the last 12 years. You'll notice that when macOS 15 was released we also received macOS 14.7 and macOS 13.7. If Apple was going to change their policy then we should've seen a Monterey update. There is no point in arguing this. We only support the 3 latest releases of macOS. |
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Kinda disappointing that dropping bottle download support also for Monterey & older macOS releases has the effect of codifying Apple's Planned Obsolescence into this Open Source project. Of course, it's understandable that everyone has limited time and even GitHub Actions runners eventually drop "support" for old macOS releases. However, dropping "support" from a maintainer's or developer's perspective can be a different and orthogonal concept to dropping "support" through pre-built old bottled versions. The maintenance burden to support old macOS versions via pre-bottled software would be much lower and have trivial impact when compared to dropping "support" for compiling everything from scratch & following Homebrew development from latest In other words: The concept of "support" can be decoupled into at least three separate concepts:
For concept number 1, this could be trivially done by locking the Homebrew repos + Taps to a specific last known In the case of conflating concepts 1 & 2 together, it creates an unintended scenario for users, as described below: There currently exists an unfortunate tragedy of the commons type of scenario given that users will eventually always end up stuck on old macOS releases due to old Apple hardware which gets locked to some macOS release (e.g. Monterey or below). As a result, even trying to use old hardware becomes unsustainable when every Homebrew install eventually becomes a compile rather than simple archived binary bottle install. Apple of course wins yet again, laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, we end up with old hardware using much more energy + CPU cycles for each user to compile all the software every time for each and every user. Also, eventually due to the same issue this hardware becomes unusable with Homebrew-packaged software prematurely before its actual physical breakdown, thus becoming e-Waste. In the grand scheme of things, this pattern of planned obsolescence is arguably unsustainable from a civilization-level and also energy & ecological perspective. So, it's rather unfortunate to see Homebrew dropping the binary pre-packaged bottles for old releases so soon, resulting in the above scenario which we observe at present with Monterey. |
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To be clear: we have not gone and deleted all macOS 12 existing bottles (4.7k formulae still have macOS 12 bottles). We're just not building new bottles for new versions anymore. We do not have the CI infrastructure to support four OS versions - the moment of transition was when macOS 15 bottles started being built instead. It's not a grand climate change conspiracy like you think it is. Of course in the ideal world of infinite resources we would build bottles for every macOS possible, but that world unfortunately doesn't exist. We already try our best to support the build-from-source path all the way back to 10.11 El Capitan rather than hard cutting off support entirely. Although build from source is indeed slow and not great and we do not test it in CI (which is why we say it's unsupported), we do accept community contributions to fix any problems that people face while on this path. You can, as you say, choose to freeze the version list at the point macOS 12 bottles stopped being built if you do not wish to install newer versions. Such decision is up to individual users. |
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Seems that some other connotations are being supplanted or rather "reading too much into" what I was trying to say.1 To be clear: I'm merely trying to shine some light on the reasons why the community might desire "support" as in "can the tool install things on old macOS" via pre-built bottles + Homebrew (frozen at some point in time or otherwise). I figured it was worth pointing out and discussing what could be done in order to provide a more sustainable and lasting approach towards old hardware, rather than going along with Apple's planned obsolescence timeline.
Quite understandable, and indeed the availability of GitHub Actions' CI/CD Runners does impact what is possible given their timeline and Apple's timeline. It's always good to set expectations about this and what users can expect to be "supported" as in the meaning "do the maintainers use/test/build on this old macOS?" It's good to know that community contributions can still be accepted and help in this area. 👍
Yes, I'll probably experiment with this at some point. I think the current scenario that I'm observing is due to Homebrew's auto-update happening while coinciding with the change from building new bottles for latest available (and supported on my old Early-2015 MacBook), macOS Monterey
Seems that some others were caught off-guard also, but at least I knew what it meant and observed the symptoms of everything newly installed starting to be built from source (very slowly on the old MacBook). Footnotes
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https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/VENTURA-DROP.html UPD: A1707(2016) Successfully updated to macOS Sequoia |
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The current latest macOS 12.x version, 12.7.6, is expected to be the last update for Monterey. macOS 15 releases on Monday alongside macOS 13.7 and macOS 14.7 and Apple support only 3 macOS versions at a time (so 13, 14 & 15).
We too only have CI testing resources to support 3 macOS versions. We've reallocated our macOS 12 CI to be macOS 15 yesterday.