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

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

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On Nov 10 04:21, Andrey Gursky wrote:
> 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.

Ending XP support was announced last year and only a year later we
actually dropped it.  So we don't support Windows XP anymore, but we
*would* support Wine.  However, the problem here is not on the Cygwin
side.

It seems Cygwin under Wine was not tested outside of XP compatibility
mode, or Wine doesn't support certain post-XP functions albeit claiming
Vista caompatibility.  Cygwin doesn't require any functionality which
isn't available in Vista.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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