On 4/19/13 5:27 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
>
> On Apr 19, 2013, at 5:13 PM, Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On 4/19/13 3:23 PM, Andrew Hood wrote:
>>> Gerald Combs wrote:
>>>
>>>> (Which reminds me - we need to set a schedule
>>>> for dropping Windows XP support.)
>>>
>>> Despite M$ enthusiasm for not supporting XP it lives on on many systems
>>> which perform their assigned duties and don't have resources to run
>>> later versions. How practical would it be to create an XP fork for
>>> security only updates?
>>
>> If the past is any indication that might be difficult. At one point a
>> security update broke Windows 2000 compatibility and it was a bit of a
>> struggle to work around it. Using that as a guide I predict the following:
>>
>> 1) Next February or March I'll migrate our Windows XP builder to Vista
>> and we will no longer automatically catch XP compatibility bugs.
>
> So does that mean that, at least in theory, the builds will still work on Vista, modulo something about the Vista build environment breaking something?
>
> If so, presumably 1.8 would then be the "XP fork", with security and some other critical fixes going in, but that's about it.
After digging around Microsoft's various product lifecycle pages it
might make sense to upgrade the XP builder to Windows Server 2003
instead of Vista. It will receive updates until July 2015 and would let
us use a testing environment similar to XP. That would make 1.10 and
possibly 1.10++ the "2003-but-you-can-probably-get-away-with-XP" fork.