[gtkada] Future of GtkAda Windows XP support

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On 23/01/2017 09:51, Emmanuel Briot wrote:
>> It would be a great loss. End customers keep on running automation
>> systems under Windows XP and don't want to go to Windows 7 and even less
>> to Windows 10.
>
> Presumably you mean “users” here. I don’t think we have customers on XP.

"Users" are we, who write HMI GUI to be installed on a Windows XP 
machine. Our customers are very reluctant to switch from Windows XP. In 
many cases they simply cannot do that due to internal regulations 
regarding the OS they are allowed to deploy.

> Microsoft itself no longer supports XP.

Yes, but in a different sense. You still can build for Windows XP 
target. MS really killed only NT, as you cannot build for that target 
anymore, at least not with the standard Windows header files.

> As a matter of fact, GNAT itself is no longer supported on XP
> anyway,

Say, somebody buys GNAT Pro for Windows. Does it mean that AdaCore will 
not support builds targeting Windows XP SP3?

> so GtkAda isn’t either. People can of course keep
> using existing versions of GtkAda that were compatible with XP, so
> there is no risk for existing projects (which in general
> do not need to evolve to newer versions of the tools), and new
> projects should not be developed for XP which is no longer
> supported by Microsoft either.

It is the old projects which are in peril due to the change. The latest 
GPL GtkAda runs well on Windows XP with the GTK binaries it comes with. 
It does run not with MSYS2 GTK binaries due to problems introduced in 
GTK lately. (E.g. there is no reason why dwmapi.dll must be linked to or 
at all, especially because it existed only on Windows Vista.) [*]

My question is if these issues will appear in the coming GtkAda binary 
distributions or AdaCore plans to fix [some of] that.

------------
* There would be no reason to change GTK binaries if GTK didn't have so 
many bugs.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de