Am 09/28/2011 11:56 PM, schrieb Dennis E. Hamilton:
Marcus,
I share your thinking about this.
If you or Oliver or someone can put a recent successful trial build where I can
get my hands on the installer version, I will be happy to perform
platform-confirmation installs. This would help me set up a routine for doing
that kind of QA in the future. (For different internationalization variations,
I can't do that alone and there needs to be help from the NL community.)
I'm not a developer nor have I tried to build OOo from source for
myself. (yes, I know, shame on me. ;-( ) However, I can offer some help
to get some basic tests done for Win2000. A running version in a VM
should be enough.
MY THINKING
I agree a smoke test against Windows 2000 and even Windows 98 would be good.
It would be useful if the colleague here who still has a Windows 95
installation could confirm some things too.
I remember that some code parts were deleted for supporting Win95/98/ME
in the past. So, I'm pretty sure that it will not work on these Win
versions.
So, please correct me if I'm wrong but when we speak about "supporting
older versions than WinXP" it's only Win2000 we speak about.
Marcus
If there is a dependency on a newer API entry, that typically shows up at load
time or shortly thereafter.
I suspect Unicode retrofitting will be the deal breaker, but it is useful to
find out and to let users know. The other prospect is if there is dependency
on a JVM or even VC++ RTL that is not supported that far back.
If an artificial cut-off can be avoided, that is a good thing. It is necessary
to do some sort of minimal testing to see if the current install works or not,
and if it doesn't, what users who try it should expect.
I am happy to test for that. It is within my competence and, I believe, the
capabilities of the Windows 7 Virtual PC.
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: Marcus (OOo) [mailto:marcus.m...@wtnet.de]
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 12:04
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [patch] Removal of Windows build requirement on unicows.dll -
issue 88652
Am 09/28/2011 01:39 PM, schrieb Rob Weir:
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 8:46 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote:
I don't think the vendor support lifetime for a consumer OS has bring the
end of application support on that OS. What is known is that there will
be further service packs, maybe not even OS security patches, but it isn't
as if they decay and die. Many machines run much longer than the support
life of the OS, and upgrades may not be feasible.
+1
I don't see a direct need to drop any OS support only because it is to
old or it seems to be. To point to Microsoft and tell the users "they
don't support it anymore, so we drop the support too" isn't a good argument.
When we leave the baseline at Windows 2000 (or whereever it is at the
moment) and tell the user we can give a "guarantee" (don't take this
word to seriously ;-) ) for WinXP and newer, it should be OK. Then there
is still a possibility to get it installed and started on Win2000.
The nice thing is a user of Windows 98 or 2000 can still download old
versions of OOo and run them. And they can do that for free. And
they always will be able to do this.
The question is not whether we retroactively support for older
versions of Windows. They question is whether we maintain that
support going forward, in new releases of the product.
Yes, and as long as there are no real technical problems I don't see a
need to drop the support.
If there *is already* or *will be* a technical limitation (e.g., API
things or system integration) that is a hurdle for going on in
supporting newer Win versions, then we have a good reason to drop the
support for older versions.
Otherwise IMHO not.
Marcus
Outgrowing the size of machine that an older OS runs on (and might be
limited to) is a different matter, as is relying on API functions that are
not supported that far back.
I don't have an opinion about the Win2k versus Windows XP SP2+ choice for
OOo. I am just curious to know what the current platform boundaries are
and might become for purposes of QA.
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Stahl [mailto:m...@openoffice.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 15:50
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [patch] Removal of Windows build requirement on unicows.dll -
issue 88652
On 27.09.2011 22:22, Rob Weir wrote:
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote:
What is the oldest Windows OS version that Apache OOo 3.4(-dev) will
be supported on? How does that compare with the oldest Windows OS
version that the last stable release (3.3.0?) of OpenOffice.org is
supported on? (If there is a JRE dependency, that is another variant
to consider.)
AFAIK OOo 3.x Windows baseline is NT 5.0 (Windows 2000);
AFAIK this OS version is no longer supported by the vendor.
I'd recommend supporting Windows XP and beyond. XP is officially
supported by Microsoft until April 2014. I'm certainly not making any
effort to maintain or test support for earlier versions. Of course,
that doesn't prevent anyone else from testing and patching to support
earlier versions.
no objection from me to raising the baseline to WindowsXP; IMHO trying to
support an OS that the vendor doesn't support any more doesn't make sense.
