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Message-ID: <429F81A9.1000706@etr-usa.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 16:01:13 -0600
From: Warren Young <warren AT etr-usa DOT com>
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To: Cygwin-L <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Re: Drop Win9x support? (was: Serious performance problems)
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Gerrit P. Haase wrote:
> 
> Alternatively, we could drop Win98 support.

Yes!

The requirement made sense back when WinXP wasn't dominant yet.  By now, 
the last machines still running Win9x are dying or being replaced at a 
fairly high rate.  I'm glad Cygwin was available during the years it's 
taken for NT-based Windows to take over.  It was good work, but it's 
time to move on.

It's not like the current Cygwin totally sucks or anything.  I can 
continue using 1.5 on my last Win9x machine indefinitely.  The main 
reasons to update Cygwin are security fixes and new functionality, and 
neither is a serious concern on such legacy machines.

The tricky part is figuring out how to continue to make Cygwin 1.5 
available to those last souls who need Win9x support.

Perhaps this could coincide with whatever Cygwin 2.0 will be.  I imagine 
Cygwin 2.0 just being an opportunity to break the ABI, get rid of cruft, 
etc.  This would naturally solve the Cygwin 1.5 availability problem: 
the new stuff would appear in a different directory on the mirrors, 
perhaps containing "cygwin2" in the path name.  Then the current 
setup.exe will look in the current place for Cygwin, and get only 1.5. 
Those wanting the new stuff would get a new setup.exe, which will look 
in the cygwin2 location.

If there are still a few things people want to push into the last Cygwin 
1.5 releases, that's fine, too.  A little parallel development during a 
major version changeover never killed anyone.

Even if some of you disagree with whether to discontinue Win9x support 
now, some of these issues still bear discussing.  This day will come 
eventually.

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