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).
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!).
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).
Regards, -- Nicolas