Re: Last Version of Cygwin for XP

[Erik Soderquist <ErikSoderquist@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 2:20 PM, Warren Young wrote:
<snip>
> I hope not.  Extended support ended nearly two years ago.  That’s 22 months of unfixed security problems, bugs, and regressions with respect to the state of the world.  (By the latter, I mean things like outdated time zone rules.)

When your use case doesn't require fixes to these issues, why waste
the resources on newer (and more bloated) packages?  My use case has
XP + Cygwin in multiple VMs that do not even have NICs to begin with,
and do repeat processing on data sets using Windows-only software.
These VMs have a memory footprint of less than 300 MB each, and a disk
footprint under 10 GB, including 3 different snapshots (effectively 3
separate variants of the machine).  The smallest I was able to make
this using Windows 7 was 1.5 GB memory/50 GB disk footprint each, it
benchmarked 30% slower, and offered zero functional benefit.

While mine is very certainly a corner case, such corner cases do
exist, and I get very tired of people consistently implying (or
outright saying) that not upgrading XP is some form of stupidity or
insanity.  Would I trust one of these hosts on the internet at all?
No; that is the key reason they do not even have NICs in the VM
configuration.  All file transfer is done via the virtual
environment's folder sharing mechanism, and the VM host is a Linux box
that has a cron job checking for updates nightly.

So far my only concession to the lack of updates has been to configure
the timezone as UTC/no daylight saving time, and that has worked well.

> The last time this topic came up, I came away with the impression that the only reason Cygwin hasn’t jettisoned XP support yet is that it’s more work than ignoring that old code.

I have the same impression.  Perhaps Corinna can confirm that?

> Eventually, Cygwin’s gonna have to scrape that barnacle off the hull.  You should already have your Cygwin XP install trees packed up in anticipation of that day.

I agree, and for my purposes, the Cygwin I use for these special
purpose hosts is already frozen and archived.


-- Erik

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