Request to update tier documentation with extra information about Intel bottles

[sitsofe]

Output of brew config

N/A

Output of brew doctor

N/A

Description of issue

Hi,

I stumbled across Homebrew/homebrew-core#269100 and was confused as to why Intel Sequoia was having bottles dropped despite being mentioned as a Tier 1 platform on https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers . After some careful searching I came across https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/5678#discussioncomment-10963910 which explains that the Homebrew project arranges for Intel Sequoia to use Intel Sonoma bottles where possible. As this isn't the easiest thing to find, could https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers be updated to mention that Intel brew is something of a tier 1.5 platform and may not have dedicated bottles? I know the page mentions that support for Intel will be wound down but it's not clear this process has already started...

[SMillerDev]

All platforms can use bottles of older versions of the platform. That isn't really related to the support tier. It's also done to work around bugs sometimes.

[sitsofe]

Well I sort of see what you're saying but... isn't it the case that at the moment the Intel platform is the one that is not having bottles built for every version of macOS when compared comparison to the Apple Silicon platform because of policy (so anything else is the exception)? If we look at https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/bceb54ffe7b58be8d34d1859484d32b6dbf04085/Formula/a/airshare.rb#L12-L17 we see bottles for three macOS Apple Silicon OSes versus just one macOS Intel OS - I don't think that's due to bugs but rather constrained capacity so that it's possible to focus more on Apple Silicon (as that's the present and future)... In such a scenario it makes sense to focus the limited resource but would it also help to also mention that less resource is being spent on certain platforms?

[p-linnane]

We're going to stop building Intel bottles entirely in 6 months. As @SMillerDev noted, the Sonoma bottles are used on both Sequoia and Tahoe. Since the next version of macOS won't support Intel hardware, this will be the final state for Intel bottles.

[sitsofe]

Fair point - I hadn't twigged that no new Intel bottles (for any macOS version) would be minted in the near future so the window for confusion is shrinking. Hopefully anyone else who has a similar question can find this discussion and see the answers within.