MacOS 10.15 boxes cannot upgrade all packages with brew

[Haroon-Khel]

ref #3045

MacOS 10.15 is out of support https://endoflife.date/macos. As a temp fix for the sake of preventing playbook crashes I have skipped the upgrade_all task on our macos 10.15 and under boxes but we need a better solution

TASK [Common : Upgrade installed packages] *************************************
fatal: [test-macstadium-macos1015-x64-1]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Warning: You are using macOS 10.15.\n
We (and Apple) do not provide support for this old version.\n
It is expected behaviour that some formulae will fail to build in this old version.\n
It is expected behaviour that Homebrew will be buggy and slow.\n
Do not create any issues about this on Homebrew's GitHub repositories.\n
Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated.\n
Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response.\n
Do not ask for help from Homebrew or its maintainers on social media.\n
You may ask for help in Homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response.\n
Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a pull request.\n
We will review it but may or may not accept it.\n\n
Error: Your Xcode (10.3) is too outdated.\nPlease update to Xcode 12.4 (or delete it).\n
Xcode can be updated from the App Store."}

@sxa Are we able to have these boxes upgraded?

Our 10.14 and 10.15 boxes make up 7/9 of our x64 mac machines, the other 2 being 12.01

[sxa]

@andrew-m-leonard Any feelings on this? Are there reproducibility/compatibilty issues that you're aware with if we were to update the build machines to a later macos?

[andrew-m-leonard]

@sxa I don't believe so for reproducibility, as that is dependent purely on the Xcode version used.
Compatibility, can't say for sure, but i'd hope the Xcode compatibility shoud at least support Apple supported levels?

[sxa]

Note that https://github.com/adoptium/temurin-build/blob/3c6f770e3dcb5bb79a8b201a7a03a75ae63e2467/build-farm/platform-specific-configurations/mac.sh#L47 explicitly targets 10.9 (Does that need a C flag as well as C++?) although only for JDK17+ on x64, so it may be ok on those versions, but not for earlier ones.

I think we'll need to test this before moving up. @Haroon-Khel can you run a build on a JDK17/x64 machine with a later OSX and see if it can still run (via a grinder or other test run) on the earlier versions? It may not matter since it's out of support but it would be good to have the data on whether there would be a potential impact to customers before moving. Same test on 8 should be done too but it seems more likely that it won't work there.

[andrew-m-leonard]

I suspect that will need changing to whatever the new Apple min supported version is? Wondering whether we could just remove it, now 10.9 is deprecated?

[sxa]

I suspect that will need changing

The OS we build on or the parameter?

I'm personally ok with the parameter staying as-is to be honest, or at least the minimum level we have test machines for. Regularly changing the OS up to the latest minimum would be a pain though IMHO. If we can build on something modern and still target older ones that'll keep our build machines a lot more stable so would be my preferred option.