Changes to the list of supported Mac OS versions

Changes to the list of supported Mac OS versions

Due to the move to the new CI service, there will be a change to the list of supported Mac OS versions. From now on the minimum version of Mac OS is 10.14.

We used to use Travis CI to build Mac OS versions, and after changing their policy to open source projects this became impossible. Valentina requires a significant number of minutes for testing. So the decision was made to migrate to a service with no time limit for open source projects. When looking for alternatives, GitHub Actions was the first choice, but later a more detailed comparison of alternatives showed that Cirrus CI was the best solution for us.

Cirrus CI is a newly founded service. The interface is rather minimalistic, but the feature set is quite unique. As well as a wide range of platforms, it has the flexibility to configure the amount of RAM required and the number of available processor cores. The job limit can be raised to 2 hours. And best of all, there is no limit on the number of minutes for open projects! 😍

It’s not without its downsides. Travis CI has better support for older versions of Mac OS. Which means we no longer have the ability to automate builds for older versions of Mac OS. Previously, we were able to support Mac OS 10.11 and above.🙁

Technically we still have the ability to support Mac OS 10.7 and above. But to do that we need to set up the environment and build the project ourselves. At this point it’s not clear how much this is needed by the community. After all, it is a significant maintenance time that needs to be somehow compensated. It may be possible to charge 1-2€ for downloading the build for an unsupported version of Mac OS from Apple.

All the above mentioned only applies to Intel version of Mac OS. M1 support is still not possible.🙉