Re: Bump MIN_WINNT to 0x0600 (Vista) as minimal runtime in 16~

On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 2:59 PM Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
> On the thread about the removal of VS 2013, Jose (in CC) has mentioned
> that bumping MIN_WINNT independently would make sense, as the
> simplication of locales would expose under MinGW some code for
> GetLocaleInfoEx():
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAC+AXB3himFH+-pGRO1cYju6zF2hLH6VmwPbf5RAytF1UBm_nw@mail.gmail.com
>
> Attached is a patch to set MIN_WINNT, the minimal version of Windows
> allowed at run-time to 0x0600 for all environments, aka Vista. This
> results in removing the support for XP at run-time when compiling with
> anything else than VS >= 2015 (VS 2013, MinGW, etc.). We could cut
> things more, I hope, but this bump makes sense in itself with the
> business related to locales.
>
> What I would like to do is to apply that at the beginning of the dev
> cycle for v16, in parallel of the removal of VS 2013. This move is
> rather independent of the other thread, which is why I am spawning a
> new one here. And it is better than having to dig into the other
> thread for a change like that.
>
> Thoughts or opinions?

I think we should drop everything older than Win 10 for PG16, as
argued in various threads where various pain points came up. For one
thing, that would make a lot of future work simpler (ie not needing to
test alternative code paths on dead computers without CI or BF, AKA
dead code), and also I don't think we really help anyone by allowing
new database deployments on operating systems that aren't receiving
vendor patches on the world's most attacked operating system. Doing
it incrementally is fine by me, too, though, if it makes the patches
and discussions easier...