I don't think the vendor support lifetime for a consumer OS has bring the end of application support on that OS. What is known is that there will be further service packs, maybe not even OS security patches, but it isn't as if they decay and die. Many machines run much longer than the support life of the OS, and upgrades may not be feasible.
Outgrowing the size of machine that an older OS runs on (and might be limited to) is a different matter, as is relying on API functions that are not supported that far back. I don't have an opinion about the Win2k versus Windows XP SP2+ choice for OOo. I am just curious to know what the current platform boundaries are and might become for purposes of QA. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Michael Stahl [mailto:m...@openoffice.org] Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 15:50 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: [patch] Removal of Windows build requirement on unicows.dll - issue 88652 On 27.09.2011 22:22, Rob Weir wrote: > On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton > <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: >> What is the oldest Windows OS version that Apache OOo 3.4(-dev) will >> be supported on? How does that compare with the oldest Windows OS >> version that the last stable release (3.3.0?) of OpenOffice.org is >> supported on? (If there is a JRE dependency, that is another variant >> to consider.) AFAIK OOo 3.x Windows baseline is NT 5.0 (Windows 2000); AFAIK this OS version is no longer supported by the vendor. > I'd recommend supporting Windows XP and beyond. XP is officially > supported by Microsoft until April 2014. I'm certainly not making any > effort to maintain or test support for earlier versions. Of course, > that doesn't prevent anyone else from testing and patching to support > earlier versions. no objection from me to raising the baseline to WindowsXP; IMHO trying to support an OS that the vendor doesn't support any more doesn't make sense.
