[Python-Dev] Switching to Visual Studio 2010 (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian at python.org
Wed Feb 1 22:59:33 CET 2012

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/endoffirefoxwin2k.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 It was released in 2004 and was superseded by SP3 and two entire OS releases.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.

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