On 20/03/2013 03:32, John Beckett wrote:
Bram Moolenaar
So how about this: 7.4.000 will be released with MS-Windows
binaries that still support the old systems. Once it's out
and it looks OK we drop support for older systems. That way
7.4 is what needs to be used for old systems. It includes a
lot of bug fixes since the last binary release. And then
7.4.001 and further can add stuff that is not possible when
building for the older systems.
That's fine for experts, but very confusing for everyone else.
It would be far better to have 7.3.999 (or whatever the final
number is) be the last version that runs on older Windows.
The official binaries normally are not updated, but why not make
an exception in this case and issue executables for 7.3.999 with
a note that it is the last version that runs on Windows older
than XP.
People would find it a lot easier to understand that 7.4.x is
the new system, and that 7.3.x was the last that supported old
systems. I haven't upgraded Vim for a while, but I assume Vim
still displays "7.3" for :version, with the included patches on
a separate line. Standard users would not understand what is
meant by 7.3.0 versus 7.3.1.
Windows builds of VIM are starting to fragment. You can take the
default build which works on all versions of Windows. Great. You can
change some compilation flags and then get more features but only work
on more recent versions of Windows. Working out which flags give you
which additional features is not always obvious, and patches have not
been policed as well as they could have to prevent this problem. If VIM
on Windows is mainly used by people who roll their own binaries this may
not be such a problem, but if there are a lot of Windows users who pick
binaries off servers then this may be a bigger issue.
I'm picking on WINVER at the moment since I believe it is not being used
correctly in the current source. It may be that the two cases I see are
the only problems, but it sets a precedent for others. Pinning down now
how such backward unsupportable changes should be coded up will help
future development. The simplest example is modify_fname() which
protects the call to GetLongPathName() which is not in Windows versions
prior to XP. It would be better coded up to use GetProcAddress() to
dynamically load and use if available.
My 2ps worth.
Mike
--
A swift kick in the butt is no way to get a dragon's attention.
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