Re: backward OS compatibility (was Re: commit: stylist dialog box localisation fixes)

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Tomas Frydrych wrote:

> Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:45:53 +0000
> From: Tomas Frydrych <tomasfrydrych@yahoo.co.uk>
> To: abidevlist <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: backward OS compatibility (was Re: commit: stylist dialog box
> localisation fixes)
>
>
> Hi guys,
>
> > Mikey Cooper wrote:
> >
> > I believe this may be related to us trying to maintain backwards
> > compatibility with vanilla Win95. TVS_SINGLEEXPAND is only defined in
> > the MinGW headers (and presumably the MSVC headers as well) when
> > targetting IE4.0 and greater. Still looking into it, but someone else
> > may have more insight into this. It can be found in /mingw/commctrl.h.
> >
>
> I think we need to decide whether we want to continue supporting vanila
> win95 or not.

First off I'm inclined to agree that unless some users really speak up it
is not worth doing. I guess I'd recommend asking the user mailing list,
putting a poll on the webpage or try and get it posted with any upcoming
articles or release notes about abiword.
I was thinking other windows software included on theOpenCD has higher
requirments than we currently do.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
The statistics on this page (worth noting because the target users are
schools which tend to have crappy hardware and software) suggest that
usage of Windows 95 has declined by a factor of four this year from (0.4
to 0.1) and although we are getting into small enough numbers that we are
probably talking within the margins of statistical error I really doubt
anyone using Windows 95 upgrades very often.

So long as we make it clear that Abiword 2.2 is the last stable version
available for windows 95 (without upgrading Internet Explorer) and it can
be easily found for rare cases where people might want it that should
probably be enough.

> I personally would be in favour of not supporting it any
> longer. I think it unlikely that there are any users who still run win95
> and do not have IE >= 4 (and if there are and do not feel like it is
> time to upgrade to something else, well, there is always AW 2.0).

Did I miss a trick? I thought 2.2 was out already and would work on
thseolder systems.

> The question of backward compatibility is, at least on win32, quite
> significant. I would, for example, love to be able to use PrintDlgEx
> instead of PrintDlg, but it is only available from w2k onwards, and I do
> not want to stop supporting win98 yet (we could decide what to use at
> runtime, but that kind of code is pain in the neck for debugging and
> maintance).

Believe it or not we have had some reports of Abiword users on OS/2.
Although If I recall correctly the were using project Odin, a derivative
of Wine. So my question is are these changes likely to make it
significantly more difficult to run Abiword on Wine?

> I think we need some objective mechanism for deciding which platform can
> be abandoned. I wonder if we could ask each person as they dowload AW to
> put down what OS's they intend to use it on (the webstats are not
> indicative in this regard, lot of folk download stuff at work, and use
> different OS at home).

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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Received on Tue Dec 21 14:32:29 2004