I'm not so sure I qualify as one of your "good folks" because my motivation is actually pretty selfish. You see, the first release of XEphem was in Dec 1990 and that, in turn, was based on ephem, an ephemeris engine I started in 1980 for a 24x80 character display. A goal from the very beginning has been to accommodate as many UNIX variants as possible, not so much for others but because I have always preferred this operating system and I wanted to have [X}ephem with me at all times. The arrival of Virtual machines has made it much easier to test on different platforms but since OS X is my development host, I don't have much motivation to build a VM of older releases.
