On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:14 PM, Ben Carroll <ben@q9y.net> wrote:

While forcefully dropping XP support would seem like a waste of time, and somewhat arbitrary. If windows builds just stops working for XP, it just stops working, however I don't foresee that happening. I would make a reasonable guess that the client probably would even run without fuss on Win2k.

The _WIN32_WINNT define that is used (0x0501) makes Windows XP the lowest version that the software will run on. It would be trivial to bump this to Windows Vista (0x0600).

But in that case the user won't get a helpful message, the software will outright refuse to run. So I thought, maybe it makes sense to show a message that XP support is going to be removed - which must happen sooner or later.

The insecurity of the platform adds urgence to this. So I thought "let's ask for advice on the mailing list".

But what I get is contortions into unrelated topics (what does auto-update have to do with this?), paranoid banter about 'manipulating users', diversions into other topics. Sure, there's a thin line between being helpful and being seen as manipulative, but it's over the top to compare this with in-browser banners. It could be so much as a one-time message.

But it's time to close this issue. I'll do nothing here. I will however stop testing on a Windows XP VM myself.

Wladimir