Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Support for old Windows versions (9x, NT4) is silently crumbling

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 22:43:10 +0100
Hi List!
I've noticed, that the libraries we use silently drop support for old Windows versions.
- WinPcap: Although it might work with Win 9x based versions, maintenance is no longer done for these versions - GTK: since 2.8, GTK no longer supports Win 9x and Win NT as GTK2.8 uses Cairo, which in turn uses functions not available on older Windows versions
We might want to switch to GTK 2.8, as "this is where the bug fixes go" as Tor Lillquist had recently written. So this update will drop compatibility for the mentioned Windows versions :-( 
However, Win9x users can still use the GTK1.x version.
So my questions is: Can we (and do we want to) support any older Windows versions if the libraries we use don't support it any longer?!?
My feeling is that only supporting Windows 2000/XP would be ok, e.g. every bug report I've noticed mentioned one of these two.
Of course, some people won't be happy with this decision, but if the libraries we use don't support it what can we do? 

Regards, ULFL