Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com X-Spam-Score: -1.2 X-Spam-Flag: NO X-Spam-Report: -1.2 points, 5.0 required * -0.0 NO_RELAYS Informational: message was not relayed via SMTP * -1.6 BAYES_00 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 0 to 1% * [score: 0.0000] * -0.0 NO_RECEIVED Informational: message has no Received headers * 0.4 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list X-Spam-Processed-By: dbcheck.staktek.com Content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Subject: RE: Drop Win9x support? (was: Serious performance problems) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 17:10:47 -0500 Message-ID: <14CEE0B69DBDFC41A192613D8B4098CA016595AB@XCH-CORP.staktek.com> From: "Terry Dabbs" To: X-IsSubscribed: yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id j52MB3he030317 No! I am supporting applications requiring cygwin on '95 and '98 that are not going away anytime soon. Terry 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. -- -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/