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.