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

[cyg Simple <cygsimple@gmail.com>]

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

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