[Bf-committers] Windows XP and the future of Blender

[Jürgen Herrmann]

Hi there,

I was thinking about some rather philosophic questions lately.
With CMake 2.8.11 released yesterday we are able to easily build Blender and Deps for XP using VS2012, before it was a fuzz. You had to switch Platform Toolsets by hand or compile a custim version of CMake for this.

My questions are:
Will there be Win XP support forever or is it planned to drop this in a future version?
Do we need XP support for 32 and 64 bit versions?
Who is able to test Windows XP builds? (I can only test on Vista to Win8 as I don't have XP anymore)
What is planned for blender in the future?

I'll install Virtual XP Mode on one of my Win7 boxes to be able to test "runability" of code. But these VMs are not able to give the performance to test features.

I'll be away for the weekend, so I can't participate in the Dev Meeting on sunday. But in general I think this has to be discussed.
There are still some Users running Blender on XP as I learned here:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?291199-32-or-64bit

Have a nice weekend ;)
/Jürgen