Question

Before you ask, yes, I have a very good reason for wanting something to run on 10.3. It’s a very small in-house project that must run on a very important person’s machine, which cannot be upgraded for a very good reason. =)

The 10.6 DVD doesn’t seem to offer an option to install the 10.3 SDK, only 10.4+. I also can’t seem to find it on Apples website.

I found this tip about how to install it on 10.5, via the Xcode optional installs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for 10.6?
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/201508-10-3-9-sdk-with-xcode-2-5-on-leopard.html

Is it incompatible, or just not offered because it’s so old? Must I use an earlier version of Xcode? Can I just try to install it via a <10.6 DVD?

Answer 1

You don’t need the Mac OS X 10.3 SDK to build for Mac OS X 10.3. Just install the optional Mac OS X 10.4 (Universal) SDK, then:

• Set your Base SDK to the Mac OS X 10.4 (Universal) SDK
• Set your Compiler Version to GCC 4.0
• Set your Mac OS X Deployment Target to Mac OS X 10.3 for the PowerPC architecture (using build setting conditions)
• Carefully avoid any API that isn’t on Mac OS X 10.3

This should be sufficient for building a Mac OS X application that will run on Mac OS X 10.3.9, even on Snow Leopard.

The 10.3.9 version number is important; if you’re using any C++ in this application, Mac OS X 10.3.9 is the first version (and the only version of 10.3) that includes the Standard C++ Library in shared library form, which is required for using GCC 4.0 or later. Otherwise you’d have to use GCC 3.3, which is neither included nor supported with Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard.

On the other hand, C and Objective-C code may even run on earlier releases of Mac OS X 10.3. I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t, but I haven’t tried it myself. Even people sticking with a 6-year-old version of Mac OS X will use the most recent version of it, right?