Proposal: Bump swift tools, macos version

[DanBurkhardt]

This is a proposal to bump minimum support up to v10.15 for macOS to enable catalyst era compilation.
Additionally: SPM breaks when using Xcode 12, this is the fix.

[DanBurkhardt]

Hi @denzenin, i see you have the last commit here-- any chance of a review?

[denzenin]

@DanBurkhardt I am not a maintainer of this repo, so cannot review 🤷‍♀️ , sorry man.

[DanBurkhardt]

@DanBurkhardt I am not a maintainer of this repo, so cannot review 🤷‍♀️ , sorry man.

Ok, no worries. Any potential for review from @cnoon, @AtomicCat, @EricAppel?

[jereme]

The deployment target for macOS is also referenced in the Xcode project file, and in the pod spec. We should modify the change everywhere and note the change in the CHANGELOG.

Additionally, the move all the way to 10.15 seems, to me, a bit excessive. Is this what is really required to fix the SPM issue, or could an earlier deployment target such as 10.14 also resolve the issue? I am unaware of how widespread Willow use is in macOS projects.

[cnoon]

I agree @jereme. We can't jump that far ahead on macOS across the project. We're trying to keep the backwards compatibility in check across all the platforms to keep the API's consistent across what we need to support.

[cnoon]

Whenever we make deployment target changes, we have to make them consistently across all platforms we support. @DanBurkhardt is there any other way we can enable Catalyst support while maintaining our current deployment targets? I haven't spent much time working with Catalyst myself so I'm not sure of the answer.

[DanBurkhardt]

Whenever we make deployment target changes, we have to make them consistently across all platforms we support. @DanBurkhardt is there any other way we can enable Catalyst support while maintaining our current deployment targets? I haven't spent much time working with Catalyst myself so I'm not sure of the answer.

Hey guys, thanks for opening the discussion.

Good points all around, we definitely do not want to needlessly scale back support for OSes if possible. When I get some time this weekend I will do some more experimenting, I'm confident that there's a way we can thread the needle here. It would also be good to attempt to learn what operating systems are actually running the tool right now, I don't know if you guys have any data on that, but it would be useful to know a solid target min version vs as low as possible.

On the question about usage in the macOS env:
The answer may well be that there are fewer macs running applications that incorporate this framework, however, we ARE on the cusp of a paradigm shift. Think pre-iOS 2 levels of opportunity, with Apple Silicon running iOS apps natively, & continued support of catalyst for iPad adaptations.

I've used a lot of logging tools-- this has been the most customizable and feature rich tool that is not hooked into a major-tech-company-analytics backend (which I don't want). Problem is-- if we can't support Mac natively with this tool, then I actually have to drop the tool in the next few months.

I'm just working with my fork for now, but I suspect others are in my position as well, and many more will be in the future.

In any case, thanks for making this great tool, it's been a pleasure to work with.

More on findings next week.

-Dan