all: announce end of support for old macOS releases

[bradfitz]

Note, Aug 2022: See #23011 (comment) for the macOS deprecation schedule.

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Apple continues to put out new macOS releases. We can't run builders for all of them forever.

I propose we announce in the Go 1.10 release notes that Go 1.10 will be the last release to officially support macOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

macOS 10.8 was last updated Oct 3, 2013, over 4 years ago.

(macOS 10.9 was last updated Mar 21, 2016, 19 months ago, which is somewhat more recent)

Apple doesn't publish official End-of-Life dates for macOS versions, but I read that their security policy is that they issue security updates for the past 3 releases.

Given that they're on 10.13 now, that means 10.13, 10.12, and 10.11 are supported by them.

Our policy of additionally supporting 10.10 and 10.9 in Go 1.11 would be even more.

/cc @rsc @ianlancetaylor

[rsc]

I just came here to suggest the same thing. SGTM.

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/82275 mentions this issue: doc/go1.10: preannounce removal of OS X 10.8 support in Go 1.11

[rsc]

Looks like we could plausibly drop support in Go 1.11 for both Mountain Lion (as previously agreed) and also Mavericks. By the time Go 1.11 comes out in August 2018, Mavericks will have gone two years since its last security update.

version	released	updated	security update
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion	Jul 2012	Oct 2013 (10.8.5)	Aug 2015 (2015-006)
OS X 10.9 Mavericks	Oct 2013	Sep 2014 (10.9.5)	Jul 2016 (2016-004)
OS X 10.10 Yosemite	Oct 2014	Aug 2015 (10.10.5)	Jul 2017 (2017-003)
OS X 10.11 El Capitan	Sep 2015	Jul 2016 (10.11.6)	Dec 2017 (2017-005)
macOS 10.12 Sierra	Sep 2016	Jul 2017 (10.12.6)	Dec 2017 (2017-002)
macOS 10.13 High Sierra	Sep 2017	Dec 2017 (10.13.2)	—

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/83795 mentions this issue: doc/go1.10: preannounce deprecation of OS X 10.9 Mavericks

[rsc]

Filed #23122 for the actual removal work (whatever that is). Looks like we'll be caught up once Go 1.11 is out and then once caught up we should probably plan to deprecate one Mac OS version each year, alternating between preannounce and remove.

Go 1.12 preannounces dropping Yosemite
Go 1.13 drops Yosemite
Go 1.14 preannounces dropping El Capitan
Go 1.15 drops El Capitan
Go 1.16 preannounces dropping Sierra
etc.