[Python-Dev] Windows XP, Python 3.5 and PEP 11 (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Mon Jun 16 23:12:18 CEST 2014

Hi,

I would like to know if Python 3.5 will still support Windows XP or not. Almost all flavors of Windows XP reached the end-of-life in April, 2014 except "Windows XP Embedded". There is even an hack to use Windows upgrades on the desktop flavor using the embedded flavor (by changing a key in the registry). Extracts of the Wikipedia page:

"As of January 2014, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP. "

"In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM's OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

A few months ago, I installed an ISO of Windows XP, downloaded from MSDN, to investigate a bug (something related to timer and HPET), but then I realized that I can use my Windows 7 VM to reproduce the issue. Now I cannot use my Windows XP VM anymore because I have to enter a product key (before I had a delay of 30 days), but I don't have this product key and my MSDN account expired. I don't want to waste my time and money with the registration thing, so I just gave up.

Any of you plan to invest time on issues specific to Windows XP and produce binaries working on Windows XP? Or can we just provide binaries without testing them?

For example, it looks like the following issue is specific to Windows XP: http://bugs.python.org/issue6926

Oh, and the PEP 11: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/#microsoft-windows "Microsoft has established a policy called product support lifecycle (...) Python's Windows support now follows this lifecycle."

Victor

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