I think MacPorts still supports PowerPC Macs. I would need to rebuild my G5 to verify it because the hard disk is long dead, but last time I checked, it worked.
I get it - it’s a different beast with very different ideas behind it, but MacPorts is BSD-solid, and that’s a lot.
MacPorts has some level of support for PowerPC, but anything that isn't in the most recent ~3-4 releases is likely to be cut off from any number of packages at useful versions. (There's substantial work down to support Rust on much older versions of macOS, but there's also versions above which Rust has cut off older macOS versions.)
I believe that there's a recommended stream for when you need older versions support, but it's definitely a secondary target from what I've been reading on the MLs.
I still think that's entirely fair for a power user tool like homebrew. With the upgrade rates of macOS that probably means that's 98% of the users would be covered. Expecting an open source project to accept bug requests from a bigger variety of versions that then would need test devices on these versions to replicate issues sounds unrealistic. Bigger companies, or Apple itself I would hold to much higher standards when it comes to that.
That makes no sense then. A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. Take the training wheels off it and then it'll be a power user tool.
> A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason.
No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.
This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.
People who downgraded to Sonoma are the definition of an edge case, maybe you hear from some of them on HN and it sounds like a big group but this is a niche of a niche.
brew used to say, more or less, "This OS is old and unsupported. Don't submit bug reports. If you have problems, too bad. If you submit a PR to fix something, we might merge it". Fair enough, right? Now it just says, "Go fuck yourself, grandpa."
True, but I think you still want to avoid Homebrew if you're interested in older Mac versions. A specific project might have some support for the version you're interested in. For example, the Go 1.23 toolchain (which isn't the latest version) supports Mac releases back to Big Sur.
I get it - it’s a different beast with very different ideas behind it, but MacPorts is BSD-solid, and that’s a lot.