Am 03.03.2017 um 19:02 schrieb Nicolas Dufour:

Hi Eduard (and all),

Thanks for your message. It's time to decide what to do with our old devlibs and Windows XP support indeed.

I have stopped working on the win32 devlibs (on an XP computer) about a year ago due to issues with Gtk3, as you explained, but also with Harfbuzz and Glib. And some others with Imagemagick and Aspell (possibly also linked to missing headers in the TDM-DCC compiler, if I remember correctly).
If Windows XP was officially dropped in Gtk+ 3.17.1, the Gnome team was also considering dropping XP for all its projects (https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2014-December/msg00055.html).

Yes, I noticed that. You did a great job with the devlibs, though, so whatever we decide going forward I'd like to thank you very much for all the effort you put into them over the year!

Does a switch to MSYS2 as build system sound reasonable to you?

If switching to MSYS2 allows us to get rid of the old devlibs and improves the Windows 32 and 64 bit support it's surely worth a try (just using the same libs versions is a huge improvement, and not only for devlibs maintainers, but for bugs managers too!).

Yes, current state is that we could drop devlibs{,64} altogether and depend solely on MSYS2. The only thing I have yet to figure out is how to treat our Python distribution. (Python is part of MSYS2 and even lxml and numpy are available so we'd be mostly covered. The remaining modules could be added via pip on the fly or we could also think about creating packages for them in MSYS2).

Is Windows XP support something we have to keep even if it means a
huge amount of additional effort and requires us to limit ourselves on
newer platforms on purpose?

No, it's not.
But we should keep XP support for the 0.92.x branch IMHO (with the old win 32 devlibs), even if it means a real LTS support for 0.92.x.
And for 0.93, we can drop XP (not that it doesn't mean dropping 32-bit, since most libraries seem to build and work correctly on 32-bit versions of Windows 7).

Good to know we're of one opinion here!

Windows XP support in 0.92.x is mandatory, no question there. However I suspect you even missed one of my last messages: Building the 0.92.x branch with MSYS works perfectly, too, and runs on Windows XP just fine!
So we can decide freely whether we want to stick with our current devlibs{,64} for the 0.92.x branch or even want to upgrade there, too. Both options have pros and cons:

devlibs{,64} are well tested so we know what we have (but also what we don't have!). Currently there are various things not working as nicely as they could or not working at all due to outdated or even missing libraries. Also having two sets of development libraries with completely different base (devlibs use TDM-GCC based on MinGW, devlibs64 use mingw-w64) often makes behaviour very inconsistent between both.
MSYS2 would solve all the issues listed above plus if we go forward with the switch it would simplify development on Windows as MSYS2 could be used exclusively for all builds making it much easier to set-up a build system that can handle everything. MSYS2 builds are obviously not tested thoroughly yet, so there's a chance of regressions (which in my opinion is the one and only con).

Regards,
--
Nicolas

Thanks for your answer and Best Regards,
Eduard