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

[Sergey Sharybin]

Hi,

Doubt we'll support XP much longer actually. It's like 12 years old system
and microsoft dropped XP support this year. This means likely no vendor
will write driver or fix issues in existing ones as well. Which will mean
real headache trying to workaround opengl issues and so.

So not sure what do you mean "drop in future version". Don't think we'll
drop it for 2.68, but t some point in the future we'll drop it (when
there'll be stoppers for maintaining it, we do not drop anything just by
whim).

Also, we could do some "gradual" drop: meaning if vc2012's builds would not
be able to run on XP, we could compile two versions of blender -- one with
msvc2008 and other one with msvc2012. We did quite the same thing with
linux builds as well (building it against different libc version using
older and newer gcc versions).


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Jürgen Herrmann <shadowrom at me.com> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin