On Jun 6 01:02, Shaddy Baddah wrote: > Hi Corinna, > > On 2013-06-05 19:39+1000, Corinna Vinschen wrote: > >I just released Cygwin 1.7.19. > > > > > >What's new: > >=========== > > > >- Drop support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP3. > > I find this change interesting. In no way am I complaining about this, > releases matching the above are well past end-of-life anyway. > > But I am curious about the technical reason (and perhaps discussion) > that ruled Win 2K out. > > I vaguely remember an issue with a broken reference to a W suffixed API > call in the DLL in the past month or two. Was that it?
No. The reason is the same why we dropped support for Windows 9x, and NT4 at one point. Every old version of Windows is lacking functionality provided by newer versions of Windows. In sum this requires a lot of code which provides different code paths based on the underlying Windows version. These different code paths are a support burden and now that we collected a lot of new code for the native x64 support, cgf and I came to the conclusion that we should strip more code from the sources which is only used by old, mostly unused versions of Windows. As you said, the times of Windows 2000 is long gone, and nobody should use XP in pre-SP3 state anyway. Actually, having said that, I admit that I'd be glad if we could get rid of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 support as well. Say what you want about Windows Vista, but the 6.0 kernel, while maintaining a lot of nagging POSIX incompatibilities, was a major step forward. Full IPv6 support including (almost) standards compatible getaddrinfo and getnameinfo calls, NTFS transactions which help to avoid filesystem inconsistencies if unlink or remove calls go wrong, locale name support, having all codepages installed by default... There's also stuff we still not use a lot, foremost the Win32 API call CancelSynchronousIo which, if it had been introduced in NT4 already, would be probably heavily used by Cygwin (think signal handling). The next big thing developement-wise is not Windows 7, but Windows 8 (of all things!), because of the new GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime call, which I'm going to introduce into Cygwin pretty soon. Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Maintainer cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat -- 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