On 2024-03-18 1:57 a.m., Samuel Therrien wrote:
I've been wondering, what's the state, intent, or policy on support for older OSes? I haven't seen it be mentioned (for example on the readme), yet still see a handle of areas of code referencing support for older OSes (XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, CE, ...), but also commits and PRs dropping support for them (at least building with 8.1 SDKs is dropped).

I'd assume to be "whatever still has a non-EOL CPython version that can be installed", but maybe not?

Yep, that's correct. As you note, dropping support for building using older SDKs is dropped more aggressively, but that generally doesn't prevent things running on those older OSs.



On a technical level, I'm also wondering if winxpgui and winxptheme actually serve any purpose anymore?

 *
    winxpgui seems to be some patched-up win32gui for XP?
 *
    I'm not sure what winxptheme is exactly. I'm not able to do much
    with it. I guess "the Windows XP 'theme' API" is some old Windows
    stuff that never quite went away in the background.

These were split to support older OS versions back in the day, but there's no longer a need given we no longer support XP at all. However, for backwards compatibility we can't really drop the names - IOW, these could all technically be rolled into a single .pyd, but `from winxpgui import foo` must continue to work somehow for all `foo` it worked for in the past.


As for Internet Explorer, technically there's a mode in Edge to allow some sites to run pages in "IE mode" (that thing really won't die, will it?), but that's still through the Edge application. The iebutton and ietoolbar demos technically do install an addon that I can see and enable in "Internet Settings", but idk if they can really do anything (and as such, if the demos are still valid).

In that case I see no reason to not consider them valid.


Cheers,


Mark
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