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From another thread:

2016-08-11 19:22 GMT-03:00, Jonathan Dearborn:

This reminds me: will SDL2 keep supporting Windows XP or what? Even 7
has been being phased out, though I can understand software support
outtlasting the OS support (people who still didn't upgrade).

On the other hand, I know somebody who got it working on Windows 98 by
just using KernelEx and a few extra stub functions, so it looks like
SDL2 is barely even doing much with XP.
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The great thing about SDL 1.2 is that it runs on Windows 95 all the way to Windows 8. I don't know if it runs on Windows 10, but it wouldn't surprise me. The graphics capabilities were limited, however, which is why SDL2 is a big deal. But if platform support is going to be limited to the latest versions of popular OSs, its usefulness is severely reduced.

Which is why it would be nice if maintainers clarified what are the
plans in the future, so at least we can get an idea of what to expect.

Of course features only present in newer OSes shouldn't be expected to
work in older ones, it's more of a question of whether programs will
keep working on old systems if you upgrade the library (which is bound
to happen e.g. if somebody rebuilds the program and the library was
obtained from the site rather than bundled with the program itself).
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It would also be nice if the maintainers actually supported the OSes they claim to! As I have pointed out before, and logged as a bug, despite SDL 2.0.4 officially still supporting OS-X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which runs on 32-bit Macs, the current versions of the Mac binaries are 64-bit only.

Richard.

Messing up the release is not the same as not supporting something anymore...

SDL 2.0.4, SDL_ttf 2.0.13 and SDL_ttf 2.0.14 binaries are all 64-bit only for Mac (I don't know about the latest releases of SDL_image and SDL_mixer because I haven't checked). For multiple releases to be affected like this makes me worry that it was deliberate. And if it was simply a "messed up release" wouldn't you think somebody would have responded to my bug reports confirming that?

Richard.

I really don't think that non-response is an indicator for either. Since all of those depend on the SDL 2.0.4 release, it makes sense for them to be all 64bit. They *couldn't* be universal if SDL 2.0.4 is 64bit only. Since it is likely the same person made all of those releases, if he messed up it makes sense for everything to be messed up.

Why there is no response, who knows. SDL is seriously not packed with active developers and a lot of things are left unanswered, so I don't think it is any indication whatsoever.

You can quickly build those frameworks yourself, btw...

The only Mac I have is a 32-bit model running OS-X 10.6, and my understanding is that whilst that is officially supported for running SDL 2.0.4 it is not supported for building it. So if that's right I have no way of running the build and creating the frameworks. I've more than once asked here for some kind person to do it for me, but there have been no takers.

If you believe SDL 2.0.4 can be built on OS-X 10.6 can you point me to a project file suitable for Xcode 3.2?

Richard.

They didn't only mess up 2.0.4. They also messed up 2.0.3. Trying to compile against that version results in failure to find winapifamily.h.

anyway, derailing a thread is a sure way to get attention

Ugg, Windows XP is dead, let it lay in the earth peacefully....


JeZxLee


On 08/13/2016 10:54 AM, Dominus wrote:

You may think that, but as a software developer with several customers who still use XP, and a product which I market as still supporting XP, it's not an attitude I can afford to take.

Richard.

Go troll elsewhere, please.

2016-08-13 11:54 GMT-03:00, Dominus:

Um no, it's part of the same thing, it's also about an old operating
system that was killed off by its vendor long ago but that SDL2 still
supports. I guess the main difference is that finding something that
can build for Windows XP is still easy, while Apple actively took
steps to ensure it's practically impossible to get things done for
their older systems.
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Well, I'm on OS X 10.11 and am still regularily compiling snapshots of software that runs on OS X 10.4 ppc (though these are using SDL 1.2 - for SDL2 dependent software I'm using 10.7 as minimum target due to deprecated audio code)

+1 for PowerPC Macs

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Richard,
Here are my SDL2 builds that I use in all of my game ports for various platforms.  This includes 32bit and 64bit Mac libraries targeting 10.6+.
https://github.com/OutOfOrder/SDL2-Binaries

On 08/13/2016 06:22 AM, rtrussell wrote:

Thanks, but I'm not sure how practical it would be to change my Xcode build from using frameworks to linking with the .dylib; I'd rather not switch to a Unix-style build.

Richard.

It definitely runs on Windows 10 since DOSBox currently uses a version of SDL from the 1.x branch (though some have been working on builds that use the 2.x branch).

I would like to add that performance-wise, SDL1.2 has serious issues from Vista upwards hen combining GDI with SDL.



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nerds

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 8:54 AM, jeroen clarysse wrote:

and proud :-)




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XP added a handful of nice features (like RAWINPUT), but Win32, so far,
hasn't been the constant tension of dropping old platforms like macOS
has been. 90% of what we need has been in Win32 since Windows NT 3.51,
much of the rest was officially backported by Microsoft (like XInput) or
can be dynamically loaded with reasonable fallbacks for older systems
(like the Shell APIs).

The Win9x OSes got dropped partially because they were ancient and
largely abandoned (whereas WinXP, while old, was still popular), and
NT-based OSes like Windows XP had guaranteed Unicode support, which
meant we didn't need two codepaths through everything or any
understanding of what a "codepage" is, which simplifies our work immensely.

We could drop XP at some point, but there's not a lot of pressure to do
so, at least until (and if!) the UWP model gets wide, wide, wide
adoption. On Mac OS X, we were falling into this gross maze of #ifdefs
and version checks and evaporating compiler support and stuff, and that
forces our hand a lot, but Windows hasn't been like that.

--ryan.


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I think something changed on Sam's system that did the builds; I don't
think it was a deliberate change, and I think he's probably too busy to
deal with it. My attitude has always been that we shouldn't ship
binaries at all, for this sort of reason.

If you're on an older Xcode because Apple abandoned you, you absolutely
have my sympathies, but my ability to help you is extremely limited. We
_do_ still support 32-bit builds of SDL, but we have the same
forced-upgrade march that everyone else does. I don't like that this is
Apple's policy about _everything_, but that's where we are,
unfortunately.

--ryan.



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Judging by the Steam Developer Survey, OS X users are 3.37% of Steam, and of that 3.37%, a large majority are running 10.9 or later, with over 60% running 10.11 or 10.5:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac
Speaking to users of SDL2 (and not really the maintainers): If you are a true build masochist, you might want to maintain 32-bit and 64-bit OS X fat binaries just to verify your fat binary build pipeline is intact, but, realistically, you would be doing so against any commercial interests. You are targeting a fraction of a fraction.

Do you think 5-10% of the 3.37% of Steam’s users who don’t pay to upgrade their machines are the ones who are paying to buy your games?

As for XP support, there is the China argument. But if you’re going to the trouble of targeting XP with Mandarin glyphs, compiling your own SDL2 binary is going to be the least of your efforts.

As a user of SDL2, I am much more interested in reasonable FORWARDS compatibility with new platforms and OSes so I can rebuild my older projects with minimal source changes. Being early on new platforms helps capture real opportunities and I am really grateful for the work going into SDL2 that makes this possible.

Michael Labbé

As far as I know, binaries built on 10.6 (with XCode from back then)
aren't even guaranteed to work on newer OSX versions - I think to
support 10.6 to 10.11 one has to build with latest XCode and
-mmacosx-version-min=10.6 - can someone who has more experience with
that platform than me confirm that?

BTW, I heard newer OSX versions run okayish in VirtualBox (without
graphics acceleration though), so running OSX in VirtualBox on a proper
PC, building binaries there and testing them on your old real Mac might
be an option.

Cheers,
Daniel

On 08/13/2016 12:22 PM, rtrussell wrote:
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Do you know why Apple breaks compatibility all the time?
Is there any good reason that remotely outweighs causing developers so
much pain?

Cheers,
Daniel


On 08/16/2016 09:30 PM, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:

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I can't answer as to whether they are "guaranteed" to work, but several people are running my app (built on 10.6 with Xcode 3.2) on recent versions of OS-X and nobody has reported any issues as yet. Feel free to try it yourself, albeit that it's only an alpha release: http://www.rtr.myzen.co.uk/BBCBasic.dmg

Richard.

2016-08-16 16:25 GMT-03:00, Ryan C. Gordon:

OK yeah I guess it isn't seen as much of a maintenance problem unlike OSX :P


That makes it sound like it'd get dropped only if Windows 7 did (since
as far as I'm aware UWP isn't available on Windows 7 either), and
there's still a good bunch of people using that.

2016-08-16 16:56 GMT-03:00, Michael Labbé:

Eh, building the library for Windows is easy (again: worst case just
grab MinGW-w64 and let it do its job, you pretty much already have to
do it if you aren't using Visual Studio anyway). The question was more
about whether XP would remain supported at all altogether (even if you
have to build yourself).
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On 16.08.2016 at 23:14 Daniel Gibson wrote:


No, I have two OSX systems: A build system running 10.6 and another
system for testing which always runs the latest version of OSX. I can
confirm that builds done using 10.6 are running fine on the latest
10.11.

The 10.6 system is running XCode 3.2.6 with the last "good" SDK,
which contains all the things that have been removed from newer
SDKs, including really old (but still useful) stuff like QuickDraw
etc.

Apple's API developer policy is really a pain the a**. In comparison
to Windows APIs all OSX APIs are pretty new and still they're deprecating
them faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Anybody remember Carbon?
Many people painfully migrated their sources from classic Mac OS to
Carbon only to hear a few years later that Carbon would be killed off
completely and that there was no way to go 64-bit in Carbon. It's
really a pain and it looks like the OSX dev management is a bunch of
amateurs with no clue of how to design long-lasting, stable APIs. Instead,
it's like they're following Greek philosopher Heraclit's famous dictum
that "everything flows" ... and that's just annoying the heck out of me.

It is because of Apple that I first learned to appreciate the robustness
of Win32 APIs. Now who would've thought that!

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Every time Win9x support is dropped, this is one of the reasons mentioned. It's as if open source developers are parroting it from each other. I don't buy it, because SDL wouldn't be the first project to need Unicode support across Win9x and WinNT. Mozilla has done it for ages in their software, a Unicode layer library by Microsoft exists, and an open-source variant of said library exists as well. That's several compatibility layers you can reuse in one way or another. Yet people act like those don't exist.

Windows XP is dead.
If saying the above makes me a Troll, then I am hiding in my cave cooking frogs.
JeZxLee

On 08/17/2016 02:50 PM, BenoitRen wrote:

2016-08-17 15:50 GMT-03:00 BenoitRen:


So what I hear is that you are volunteering to add support back for Win9x using any these libraries and maintain it for free forever?


Gabriel.

Well that sounds a little harsh.  What Ryan's main point is that simpler code is better.  It's easier to follow, and easier to maintain.  I'm sure if someone volunteered to implement and maintain Win9x/NT, and it was done well, it wouldn't be rejected.


On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 2:50 PM, BenoitRen wrote:

Uniscribe (USP10.DLL) is usable in Win9x, albeit with limited functionality compared with its later incarnations, and that's how I achieve continuity of support for Unicode from Win9x (with IE 5.5) right through to Windows 10.

Richard.

Saying that Window XP is dead is fine.  It's arguably true, even.  Stating it as a contradiction to the running discussion and providing no constructive information is how one trolls.

Jonny D


On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Jesse Palser wrote:

Also, in China 40% of the users still use WinXP.

On 08/17/2016 09:32 PM, Jonathan Dearborn wrote:


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This was the commit that removed Win9x support from PhysicsFS...look at
that sea of red, as all sort of compatibility tapdancing became unnecessary:

https://hg.icculus.org/icculus/physfs/rev/4cdb856021dd

SDL has a _lot_ more Windows-specific code than PhysicsFS, too.

--ryan.


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I think the suggestion was to just require installing the Unicode
support on Win9x. Somebody who didn't already have it installed
probably is not going to bother doing it now though.
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As I alluded to before, my approach is to support Win9x + IE5.5 (which provides Uniscribe). Customers who want to run my application on Win9x understand that they may need to install IE 5.5, which doesn't require any 'technical' knowledge. There is virtually nothing in my app which is Windows version specific.

Richard.

Okay, I'm not _against_ SDL2 supporting Win9x, if we're just going to
link against the same things we do now and some magical thing will make
it work right on Win9x systems without any effort on our part; foisting
this onto the user to solve with reasonable steps (if "install a 16 year
old web browser on your 21 year old OS" counts as reasonable) is better
than telling the user it just flatly doesn't work...but that being said,
it's not anything I plan to spend time on.

I will accept reasonable patches for this, but I dunno, the definition
of "reasonable" is pretty narrow right here.

--ryan.


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