State of Mac OS support

[Eric S. Raymond]

There have been inquiries from Daniele Nicolodi and Fred Wright about
Mac OS X support.

Mark Atwood, who's our strategy/product-management/external-relations
specialist, may override me on this.  Unless and until he does, here's
the skinny:

<rant>

We're supporting 10.12, which has the POSIX clock calls.  Earlier
versions can go piss up a rope.

The reason I am vehement about this is that I recently learned a
thing: some pre-10.12 versions ship with headers that don't match
what's documented for their releases on the Apple website.

If Apple can't be bothered to keep its act together enough to present
a stable and documented API, we can't be bothered to support their
crap.

Yes, we used to ship a special accommodation for Apple's non-POSIX
calls in 10.11.  At some point it broke.  Given what I learned later -
including one rumor that their non-POSIX clock-setting call is a no-op
- I cannot be fscking bothered to figure out *why* it broke.

I consider this entire sorry history a lesson in the wisdom of *not
making exceptions* to our POSIX-baseline policy.  Doing that for Apple
was a mistake I don't intend to double down on.

If the 10.12 POSIX clock calls don't work, that's *Apple's* problem.

</rant>
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be
bought at the price of liberty.		-- Hillaire Belloc