Hi,
first of all: the original question of Quentin was if it is fine to use
W2K functions by breaking "older" platforms. A clear and sane reasoning
showed that there is no problem with that, "older" platforms are out of
our scope or not supportable since mingw does not support them.
This is the topic. We agreed on an answer without a vote against.
This list has the habit of too often going astray because we are moved
by personal opinions. This leads to discussion which is good, but
generates also often discussion threads that resemble wars and lead to
conflicts among users and developers.
Gregory Casamento wrote:
Win2k is not so common as you might think:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
that data indicates that it's being used by about 0.4% of all users
worldwide. While this might not be the most accurate assessment of
the actual installed base, I believe it's the best statistic we have.
As written by David, this kind of statistic is quite unrealistic.
Surely, few people will use W2K for browsing, but it is still deployed
on machine like servers or workstations of "Internal" use. SInce we want
GNUstep to work on Servers too...
By the same reasoning it would not be useful to support W2k3 ! Wow, a
sloppy 1.3% ?
Yet go into a datacenter and count up how many servers run W2k3 or old
W2k...
Maybe we should stop supporting Linux? It is used by less than 5% of the
people browsing.
GNUstep shall remain of general purpose. Suppose you want to write a
server application which has a GUI (absolutely standard on a windows
system).
Also, our current win32 backend probably almost supports winCE, not a
bad thing, isn't it?
A reasonable solution could be to root win32 backend into GDI and leave
"advanced" support do cairo on windows. And bet, there can be an use of
the pure win32 backend.
3) officially deprecated and will not see either bug fixes or new features
4) will likely disappear in a future release of windows.
GDI has such a large user base and windows relies heavy on
compatibility. So surely it won't get features, but I don't expect it to
disappear so soon. It was told dead with Vista yet it still works on 7.
Riccardo
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