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The first-time installation on Mac OS X 10.5 has been improved

This is just pleasant to see. Some people like/are stuck using older OSes.

Which Apple itself conveniently ignores (inconveniently for its developers), e.g., Xcode hacks and looking for 3rd party copies of old SDKs to be able to keep compiling for older OSes. :(

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Fun fact: for maximum compatibility our vendored portable Ruby 2.3.3 was compiled on 10.5 (hence these fixes).

While it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous.

What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?

10.6 is still used by a lot of people on Intel processors, and compiling for it on a modern platform involves the hacks I mentioned.

Any ideas why, though? I can understand not wanting to be on the latest-shiny until the inevitable initial bugs are fixed... but does Apple even provide security updates for 10.6?

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