2.6.x: broken compatibility with Wine

2.6.x: broken compatibility with Wine

[Andrey Gursky]

Hi,

this issue has been reported 2 month ago [1]. Since MinGW-w64/MSYS2 on
Wine is still totally broken and Cygwin is a regression trigger, I'm
starting here a thread to track the progress. Qian Hong (fracting)
shared an excerpt from IRC-log [2] with some details. Corinna suggested
to revert ffcef70. But this didn't happen. I'd like to kindly ask about
current considerations towards fixing the lost compatibility.

Thanks,
Andrey

[1] mintty doesn't start under wine-staging
    https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/682

[2] IRC-log cut
    https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/682#issuecomment-247065973

P.S. Was it not too early to remove WinXP support? Though it is
officially not supported anymore, there are still PCs running WinXP
(and Wine). Also there are still systems, I've heard, using some
embedded Windows, that shares the same code with WinXP, thus making it
not yet truly obsolete. Additionally a lot of work has been done by
Cygwin contributors to support this OS and I believe the most of bugs
have been workarounded, while due to stopped development it is not
likely one has to spend time solving new problems. So was it really
worth to drop the hardly crafted code? Are there already some
worthwhile advantages? Why wasn't it possible to switch Cygwin WinXP
support to just "not officially supported"? (kindly asking)

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple

Re: WinXP is dead [WAS: 2.6.x: broken compatibility with Wine]

[cyg Simple]

On 11/9/2016 7:59 AM, Andrey Gursky wrote:
> 
> P.S. Was it not too early to remove WinXP support? Though it is
> officially not supported anymore, there are still PCs running WinXP
> (and Wine). Also there are still systems, I've heard, using some
> embedded Windows, that shares the same code with WinXP, thus making it
> not yet truly obsolete. Additionally a lot of work has been done by
> Cygwin contributors to support this OS and I believe the most of bugs
> have been workarounded, while due to stopped development it is not
> likely one has to spend time solving new problems. So was it really
> worth to drop the hardly crafted code? Are there already some
> worthwhile advantages? Why wasn't it possible to switch Cygwin WinXP
> support to just "not officially supported"? (kindly asking)
> 

This has been answered.  The problem with supporting XP into infinitude
is that every application would need to agree to do the same.
Improvements to the OS API would not be able to be used so there are
trade-offs for the continued support of an OS that is no longer
supported.  The code becomes unwieldy to maintain because a change needs
to be tested on other systems.  Security maintenance becomes impossible
because the OS vendor no longer supports the older OS.  There is the
cygwin time machine, USE IT if you need old software for old OS.

-- 
cyg Simple

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple