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

[Andrey Gursky <andrey.gursky@e-mail.ua>]

Hi 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.

Thanks for your reply (however I haven't received it, because you
likely didn't click on "reply all"?).

Do you refer to the recent message [1]?

Regarding cygwin time machine. I can't use it, since cygwin is compiled
for MSYS2. And then it is being run under Wine on GNU/Linux. While
WinXP is still not dead, Wine is definitively not an old OS. It's just
an active project doing WinAPI implementation from scratch according to
documentation. Thus I hope Cygwin developers could talk directly to
Wine ones to find the minimum needed changes in both projects.

Regards,
Andrey

[1] Re: New Cygwin "setup" program useless on my Win-XP box. Not very
    nice at all.
    https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2016-11/msg00060.html

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