[Python-Dev] Switching to Visual Studio 2010

[Brian Curtin]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 15:37, Catalin Iacob <iacobcatalin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:43 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> ...
>> P.S. Here is my personal list of requirements and non-requirements:
> ...
>> - must generate binaries that run on Windows XP
>
> I recently read about Firefox switching to VS2010 and therefore
> needing to drop support for Windows 2000, XP RTM (no service pack) and
> XP SP1. Indeed, [1] confirms that the VS2010 runtime (it's not clear
> if the C one, the C++ one or both) needs XP SP2 or higher.
>
> Just thought I'd share this so that an informed decision can be made,
> in my opinion it would be ok for Python 3.3 to drop everything prior
> to XP SP2.
>
> Maybe not very relevant, but [2] has some mention of statistics for
> Firefox usage on systems prior to XP SP2.
>
> [1] http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/526821/executables-built-with-visual-c-2010-do-not-run-on-windows-xp-prior-to-sp2
> [2] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/01/end_of_firefox_win2k.html

We already started moving forward with dropping Windows 2000 prior to
this coming up.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-May/111159.html was
the discussion (which links an older discussion) and PEP-11
(http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/) was updated accordingly.