The largest share of customers, by far, wouldn't want us to add new features to XP since that would entail risks of new bugs, application compatibility regressions, and frequent need to retrain users. If Ford or BMW were continuously retrofitting design changes to vehicles in use, the mechanics, parts dealers etc. would have headaches keeping up. Moreover, if those companies spent their time and energy that way adding little extras, we wouldn't see as much progress in improvements to reliability or fuel efficiency; I suspect most people are glad they don't operate that way. It's not that I wouldn't want you to enjoy great language capabilities on XP or whatever other old system you might have; it's just a matter of being realistic. You shouldn't expect Unicode 6.2 support in an Android phone from 2008; even less so, from a Windows XP system from 2001.
Peter Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Eli Zaretskii<mailto:e...@gnu.org> Sent: 7/18/2013 11:47 PM To: Peter Constable<mailto:peter...@microsoft.com> Cc: nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org<mailto:nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org>; unicode@unicode.org<mailto:unicode@unicode.org> Subject: Re: Ways to show Unicode contents on Windows? > From: Peter Constable <peter...@microsoft.com> > Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 03:19:44 +0000 > > You can't expect an OS like Windows XP to support Old Italic characters that > weren't even defined in Unicode at the time it shipped. In all fairness, I think you forget the regular OS updates. I have XP SP3 installed on one of my machines, and it gets updates until this very date (the last one was just a week ago). One of those updates could bring an upgrade of Uniscribe and whatever else is needed to support newly introduced scripts. No one said that these updates are only for fixing "security holes" or other urgent problems. Moreover, the updates are subdivided into "important" and "optional", so the script support could be in "optional" area, if that's important. So I guess it's just a matter of managerial decision somewhere, whether to bring this new support to existing systems or request users to upgrade to the next OS version. I see no technical reasons here.
