"Richard Stallman" <[email protected]> writes: > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > , > > > Gnulib does not support the old mingw.org mingw any more. The > > > mingw.org website is dead, and the development has been taken > > > over by the mingw-w64 project more than 15 years ago [1]. > > > I know. But I still use it, and it is the only development > > environment capable of building Emacs that will run on versions of > > Windows before Windows 7, which MinGW64 dropped, and Emacs still wants > > to support. > > One of the virtues of free software is that we continue to support old > computers. No version of Windows morally deserve our support, but if > some of us feel like working on that, it is useful to help the people > who use Windows. > > The old versions may be insecure by long-ago accident, but that is no > worse than the new versions that are insecure by intent. Microsoft > won't fix any of them.
As far as Emacs support for Windows goes, I think there may be a misunderstanding here: it's not about how old the computer is or which version of Windows it runs, it's about which toolchain is used to build the binaries. The old "mingw.org" (the domain name appears to have been transferred to a company that now runs advertising on it) aims to support, I believe, everything down to Windows 95. "mingw64" does support 32-bit binaries and machines, but I don't know precisely which ones. There are recent threads discussing support for Windows XP and Windows 95, but I'm not sure what the conclusion of those threads was. Again, mingw.org isn't just no longer seeing development, it's increasingly hard to find binaries, and harder still to find source code; some servers have expired SSL certificates, the main website is down, mirrors go away or become unreachable a lot. Even if you can find the binaries and the source code, I haven't tried rebuilding one from the other, and I wouldn't be surprised if that task were very difficult today. (In case anyone needs my downloads, please contact me and I can share them). I understand there was a lot of unpleasantness there, including trademark and legal issues, but I think our options at this point are not to support Windows or to support it using the "mingw-w64" toolchain (which, again, includes 32-bit support). I tried a Windows 95 VM, and both the mingw.org version of Emacs and the mingw-w64 (32-bit) version failed to run; both appear to rely on kernel APIs that were added in later versions (AddVectoredExceptionHandler and IsProcessorFeaturePresent, respectively), but the mingw-w64 version also requires MMX instructions to be enabled. This seems nontrivial to fix. Of course, the MPS library also doesn't target such ancient versions of Windows, so any MPS support on that platform would require significant porting work. CCing Po Lu, who knows much more about this and might be able to correct me. Pip
