On Thu, 31 Dec 2020, Jacek Caban wrote:
Yes, but the critical part is the very first sentence, which says that 'you
can specify which versions of Windows your code can run on.'. Note the
difference between *can* and *need*. When using mingw-w64 with its defaults,
you essentially *need* to do that if you're working on a modern application.
That article is about changing the value, not about the meaning of its
default value. The current difference between 'can' and 'need' comes from
toolchain defaults and all we need to do to be precisely compatible with
mentioned documentation is to change the default to win10, like authors of
this documentation did in their SDK.
Fair enough, yes, that's a correct distinction to make here I guess.
I guess that was the core part of my doubts regarding this, so with that
cleared, I won't object to this change.
I still think there's a risk that it'll break (or more subtly, affect) a
handful of projects (I need to revisit VLC's configure, for instance), so
some general headsup to e.g. the msys2 project probably is warranted
though.
Then again, I can agree with the argument that projects that are built for
distribution across older versions maybe should take care to specifically
set the define themselves anyway.
Regarding the current archaic default, an alternative path (that doesn't
take us all the way, but at least a bit on the way) would be to bump it to
Win7.
I think that it's better than nothing, but it would only move the problem. It
also rises more questions like why not win8? When will we rise it again? Will
we wait until win7 becomes 19 years old? I think that those questions are
better answered individually by projects themselves, we can't make a single
choice good for all of them.
That's true; the main motivation for specifically raising it to win7 would
be if we'd generally drop support for older versions.
I also faintly remember somebody suggesting that we'd formally drop support
for XP altogether.
FWIW, that sounds about right to me, but I didn't want to make this change
about dropping XP support. I guess that what we're missing is some form of
discussion and formalizing it, if that's the consensus.
Yeah, that's probably a separate discussion. And before doing it, I guess
we should quantify what we actually gain from it, instead of just doing it
for the sake of doing it. Being able to rely on more features in
msvcrt.dll (for setups that use it) probably would be one thing.
// Martin
_______________________________________________
Mingw-w64-public mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mingw-w64-public
