Am 22.07.2021 um 15:16 schrieb Mr:

> I am surprised, we are not even talking about dropping windows XP or 32 bits
> compatibility, right?
...
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the POV core team contingent, does not seem so
> close from being as numerous and ressourcefull of a community as these ones. So
> it sounds reasonable to lower such maintenance burdens on existing developers
> temporarily to allow for a later regrowth of ubiquity which is indeed POV's
> strongest "selling points". If it does have to happen one day, Now is also a
> better time than ever to do such very mild support drops, one at a time, before
> POV 4 gets on the rails and too many breakage at once may feel hard.

The point is, currently there is no truly pressing need to ditch XP 
support (or 32 bit, for that matter).

What we can do, for example, is to proceed as follows:

- Use VS 2019 for the binaries we distribute with the regular 
installers, in hopes that it will give us the best in terms of 
performance. This would make those binaries require at least Windows Vista.

- Use VS 2017 (which is the last version of Visual Studio that should be 
capable of building XP-compatible binaries) for a separate set of 
XP-compatible binaries, to be distributed in a separate installer.


Right now, we've encountered nothing more than a road bump trying to 
compile cmedit.dll in an XP-compatible fashion.

Had the feedback to our question regarding XP been "...(crickets)...", 
we might just have left it at that and not bothered to investigate any 
further. Or maybe only later, after the official v3.8.0 release.

I'm sure it's not a major obstacle, just something somewhere not 
entirely set up properly. Nobody has tried building the cmedit.dll since 
v3.7.0.0, so it might just be something we happen to have borked in the 
meantime.


Even if the problem should turn out to be something larger, there are 
enough other options we could try. In the worst case, there's a clear 
path of having XP users deal with a minor inconvenience most probably 
wouldn't even notice, or possibly mistake for a feature.


(As a side note, the v3.8.0.beta.1 has been compiled with VS 2015, due 
to some other road bump encountered also with respect to cmedit.dll)

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