> I know that one general goal is to keep Inkscape as backwards compatible as reasonable.
> Supporting more that just the greatest and latest helps us gain more use.
 
Oh yes I completely agree; sorry I should have made that clear. I'm not planning to make inkscape incompatible with NT 4.0, ME, or whatever arcane OS you choose to use. I'm simply planning to allow inkscape to take advantage of specific features of the newer versions of windows where available.
 
For example, if I'm customising the Windows common file dialog to add a preview pane, the ideal is to try and make it look good for every platform by tailoring it for each version of the OS. This isn't as hard as it sounds though, because the file dialog has only really had two forms in the last decade: "explorer style" from the 95/98/ME/NT4.0 era, and "2000 style" which is nearly the same but with a places bar down the left. For Vista and newer MS have introduced a new more advanced file dialog API, which allow Windows to natively give us all the features we want without having to customize anything.
 
So hopefully when I get these three done we should have file dialogs that look seamless in every supported version of Windows, and which will continue to look good for every version of the OS into the future. But without the new versions of the SDK, I can't easily do anything other than a 95/98/ME/NT4.0 style dialog.
 
Do you see my problem?
 
Joel
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Jon A. Cruz
To: Joel Holdsworth
Cc: inkscape-devel@...575....sourceforge.net
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 1:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Upgrading the MingW pack


On Sep 17, 2007, at 3:42 PM, Joel Holdsworth wrote:

My main problem is that if you look at 

mingw\i686-pc-mingw32\include\windef.h you'll see on line 12 that WINVER is 

#defined as 0x0400 which indicates that the version of the Windows SDK is 

very old - that WINVER value corresponds to NT 4.0! This is a little 

troublesome for me because there are some newer APIs which I need to be able 

to use, and I'd like to use them without defining home-brew versions of 

those APIs. So is there any scope for upgrading to a more modern version of 

the SDK?


I know that one general goal is to keep Inkscape as backwards compatible as reasonable. Supporting more that just the greatest and latest helps us gain more use. It's also in line with the Open Source model as far as staying useful, as opposed to the commercial business model where it benefits the vendor to push end users to constantly buy newer stuff.

Probably before going with any new features/API's you should do a quick check to see what that would change the minimum runtime requirements to.

When I was fixing some stuff a while back, I was surprised to get actual end-user bug reports from people using NT 4.0. Keep in mind, of course, that usually people who hit problems just drop trying the software and go away without saying things.