[Python-Dev] Switching to Visual Studio 2010

[Brian Curtin]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 15:41, Brian Curtin <brian at python.org> wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, hit send too soon...

Anyway, I can't imagine many of our users (and their users) are still
using pre-SP2. It was released in 2004 and was superseded by SP3 and
two entire OS releases. I don't know of a reliable way of figuring out
whether or not pre-SP2 is a measurable demographic for us, but I can't
imagine it's enough to make us hold up the move for another ~2 years.