[Spice_announce] Dropping support for Macintosh PowerPC (Motorola Mac) environments; Using Icy or JNISpice under OSX 10.7 ("Lion")

[Acton, Charles H (343N)]

Dear Colleagues,

With the 2011 domestic SPICE class now behind us the NAIF Team is starting
to focus on release of the next Toolkit, Version N65.

As announced long ago, with that release we will drop support for two
Windows environments:
  PC-Windows-Compaq Visual (Digital) FORTRAN
  PC-Windows-Lahey FORTRAN.

Now we are also contemplating dropping support for the three
Macintosh/PowerPC ("Motorola chip") environments:
  Mac/PowerPC, OSX, Apple C, 32bit
  Mac/PowerPC, OSX, Absoft FORTRAN, 32bit
  Mac/PowerPC, OSX, g77, 32bit

If you have concerns about these plans, please write back explaining why.


The recently announced problem using the IDL Toolkit ("Icy") and the
alpha-test Java Native Interface Toolkit ("JNISpice") under the Mac OSX
10.7 ("Lion") operating system has been resolved. Until the Version N65
Toolkits are released (still some months away) you will need to write to
someone at NAIF to obtain a patch.

Regards,
Charles Acton