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Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2013 18:28:25 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: Cygwin 1.7.19
Message-ID: <20130605162825.GC3250@calimero.vinschen.de>
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References: <announce DOT 20130605093949 DOT GA3250 AT calimero DOT vinschen DOT de> <51AF530A DOT 7080306 AT shaddybaddah DOT name>
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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

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