COMMUNITY POLL: Increase Minimum Versions on Windows and GTK+

[andlabs]

I'm going to let the community decide the future of compatibility for package ui (and its backend sisters libui and wintable).

Currently, the minimum versions of systems supported by package ui are intended to be 1:1 with minimum versions of systems supported by Go. (The only exception is that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is not supported due to build difficulties.) I'm willing to change that iff the community doesn't mind.

1. Should Windows XP support be dropped? Windows Vista-and-up-only would only result in relatively minor changes, such as horizontal mouse wheel support, use of Task Dialogs instead of plain old messageboxes, use of the Vista-style Open and Save File dialogs, and some other backend stuff. It'll also allow me to provide things, such as placeholder test in text fields, that don't work correctly in Windows XP (in the case of placeholder text, the feature is removed entirely if East Asian language support is installed).
2. Should the minimum version of GTK+ be bumped up? Even going from 3.4 to 3.6 would add a bunch of neat stuff. Dropping 3.4 support would mean Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS users would need to upgrade. A 3D OpenGL context that supports Wayland would require GTK+ 3.8 (though GTK+ 3.4 supports Wayland, the necessary GDK functions to get Wayland handles out of a GdkWindow were not added until 3.8; GtkGLArea was added in 3.16, which is too new).

(Before anyone says anything, we still have people come into IRC upset that Go doesn't run on RHEL5, so unsupported OSs aren't quite nonissues.)

You decide! No deadline yet.

[shazow]

Do whatever is easiest for you while you don't have a lot of users depending on legacy features. :)

[TeddyDD]

Should Windows XP support be dropped
Definitely. Supporting that old OS is more trouble than its worth.

[andlabs]

Updated first post to say that a 3D OpenGL context that supports Wayland would require GTK+ 3.8.

[andlabs]

I'm tempted to go ahead and pull the Vista-only switch now. This is thus your last chance to stop me.

[andlabs]

Done.

[andlabs]

Should I drop stock Vista, SP1, and SP2 without Platform Update? This will let me use Direct2D and DirectWrite. The former will simplify the drawing model, the latter the text model.

[NotTheEconomist]

@andlabs I wouldn't be too deeply concerned about pulling legacy support of any Windows OS that Microsoft doesn't support. Per http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle Vista has extended support until April 2017, but SP1 has stopped receiving Service Packs.

I'd continue to support SP2, but I feel Vista and SP1 are fair game.

[andlabs]

Well you're in luck; those have been dropped for months now :) SP2+Platform Update is the earliest that will work now.

[andlabs]

I'm closing the poll now, as I've already decided on a course of action:

Windows XP support has already been dropped; Windows Vista SP2 + Platform Update is already the minimum supported version.

Once Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is released, I'll drop GTK+ 3.4. Unfortunately, GTK+ 3.4 was lucky in that it was provided by both an LTS release of Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) and a stable release of Debian (Wheezy). The next releases of both, 14.04 LTS and Jessie (respectively), do not come with the same versions of GTK+; 14.04 LTS comes with 3.10 and Jessie comes with 3.14. As a result, I have to choose the former, so we will be moving up to 3.10 only. This means we don't get things like GtkPopver (3.12), but it's a start. (3.10 will also allow support for openSUSE 13 and Fedora 20 and newer. I don't know about RHEL/CentOS or other distributions.)