Mike Shaver wrote: > On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Robert Kaiser<ka...@kairo.at> wrote: >> Mike Shaver wrote:
>>> On the bright side, SeaMonkey will be able to continue to support XP >>> SP1 and Win 2k, and thereby gain all those users, since per your other >>> message they'll just switch to another browser -- sounds like a real >>> opportunity for you.
>> Wrong. We can't go with different requirements than the Geck we base upon -
> Sure, but the SeaMonkey team could maintain the alternate code paths > and compensations required for XP SP1 and Win2K, and drive the testing > on those platforms, right?
> Or is that not a good use of your limited resources either? :)
Erm, to be serious, we have good reasons to reduce the amount of code we maintain and use toolkit instead of xpfe - I guess that should answer your question ;-)
And yes, I know, that's all tough calls, but I wonder why we support MacOS or Linux at all when it looks so easy to probably abandon more users than we have on both of those together (has anyone stats that would back or disprove that assumption?)
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at> wrote: > And yes, I know, that's all tough calls, but I wonder why we support MacOS > or Linux at all when it looks so easy to probably abandon more users than we > have on both of those together (has anyone stats that would back or disprove > that assumption?)
We would lose a lot of our developers, and valuable tools (shark, valgrind), if we didn't support those operating systems, to say nothing of Linux being one of our major mobile platforms. Are you just trolling, or do you really not know that?
Rob Arnold wrote: > On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 2:31 AM, John J. Barton <johnjbar...@johnjbarton.com >> wrote:
>> Michael Connor wrote:
>> software. I don't believe we should make a decision based on users who >>> can't upgrade their OS because they aren't using it legally.
>> Ok, I guess we disagree. I think mozilla should make decisions based on the >> needs of their users.
> I don't want spend my time debugging or trying to reproduce an issue for an > operating system that isn't up to date when it could easily be. If users are
But as I pointed out, updating is not always easy. Many, many users avoid Windows updates if at all possible because historically they know updates break things and rarely offer significant improvements.
> illegally using their OS and cannot upgrade due to that, I do not want to > have to bend over backwards to recreate their environment to reproduce the > bug and test a fix (in addition, there are moral issues with helping these
I think there is a large gap between "continue to support XP SP3 on 1.9.2" and "bend over backwards". Of course maybe I should try yoga.
> users). I would argue that supporting those systems doesn't help the needs > of the vast majority of users who are using their OS legally and properly > maintaining it.
But do you really want to base decisions on morality? Shall we ask users to certify that their machine is being used legally and has been dusted regularly? They never surf to sites on a mozilla-do-not-visit list? Always properly shutdown at night?
I don't think any of this is mozilla's business. The only issue is the number of users of XP SP2.
Mike Shaver wrote: > On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Robert Kaiser<ka...@kairo.at> wrote: >> And yes, I know, that's all tough calls, but I wonder why we support MacOS >> or Linux at all when it looks so easy to probably abandon more users than we >> have on both of those together (has anyone stats that would back or disprove >> that assumption?)
> We would lose a lot of our developers, and valuable tools (shark, > valgrind), if we didn't support those operating systems, to say > nothing of Linux being one of our major mobile platforms. Are you > just trolling, or do you really not know that?
Actually, I wanted to point out (somewhat in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way) that the number of users we're dropping with this decision might outweigh the number of users we have on those other platforms which we apparently value significantly. Of course, there's a lot of guessing involved, as I'm not someone who has access to that shrine that keeps all the actual number to back or counter that assumption.
There are a quite significant number of business users out there who are still on Win2k (I don't care so much about XP < SP2) and it's not even unheard that Microsoft itself prolongs support times for versions heavily used in businesses (they even did so for Win98). We once had that plan that our releases after 1.9.0 would be smaller in scale and happen more often - I think 6 months was the target then, and yes, 1.9.1 missed that by far. I for one moment assume that this is still the plan - we don't have dates yet but you might know more than me, even this open community shows that early-stage information is still closed to smaller groups often enough. With all that in mind, the 6-month post-1.9.2.0 maintenance period of 1.9.1 would suggest that the last version that supports Win2k might even be out before the current official EOL of Microsoft support for Win2k, even if they don't prolong this due to significant business usage.
Unsupporting a Windows version before even Microsoft drops it would be very much unprecedented, and given that the primary argument seems to be limited manpower and our manpower has nothing else than significantly increased over the last years, sound like something not that easy to buy in for someone watching this.
Of course, we are becoming more and more like big companies regarding the decisions made, and while that might be good from some points of view, it's not so easy to sell to those parts of our community that expect us to think differently.
SP3 was much more incremental in nature over SP2 compared to SP2 over SP0/SP1. I'm personally sending this message from a company-controlled computer running SP2 still. Given that SP3 doesn't seem to be offering anything special over SP2 API-wise, why not set the cutoff at SP2 like IE7/IE8?
> And yes, I know, that's all tough calls, but I wonder why we support > MacOS or Linux at all when it looks so easy to probably abandon more > users than we have on both of those together (has anyone stats that > would back or disprove that assumption?)
According to Net Applications, both OS X 10.5 and 10.4 are more popular than Windows 2000 (6.00% and 2.66% vs. 1.24%).
Windows 2000 is more popular than Linux (0.90%) and all major mobile platforms that we currently support or intend to support (Symbian 0,06% and Windows CE 0.05%) combined.
Mike makes a good point however on the importance of Linux as a dev platform (although based on my experience at the summit, pretty much every techie in the US now runs a Mac).
But based solely on marketshare, we should not abandon W2K yet.
I couldn't find any data on Windows XP service pack allocation.
My "guess" would be that many people have at least updated to SP2, since it was really a major update with many security and feature enhancements that were widely discussed in tech *and* general media.
But I don't have any hard numbers on that. My "guess" for the update to SP3 however is that not nearly as many people have made that step, since it was mostly just a bundling of past security patches.
For example my company (Big4 professional services/auditing company with roughly 120.000 Windows installations worldwide) is still running Windows XP SP2, but Microsoft security updates are regularly installed.
Robert Kaiser wrote: > Wait, you seriously believe one single user would upgrade their OS just > because there's no new Firefox available for them?
(One not-typical user story:)
Not just because of Gecko, and only after a long time with v1.8.1, but I did eventually replace my W98SE with W2Ksp4. That was after Microsoft and everyone else stopped providing softwares/updates for W98.
The only interesting point was I could run W98 without a need for firewall nor antivirus.
Now, while WXP has some improvements I miss somewhat in W2K, I'm certainly not interested in some other new features of WXP and beyond.
... My goal would be to move to Linux, but that looks like a "big" task, and I know beforehand some of the softwares I use are still available on Windows only :-/
Going from there, I'd also like to see the number of computer users in the world (or just North America if that isn't possible) that don't have Firefox and what OS they run. It's a tall task, but the decision that's being discussed here is pertinent enough to ask for that IMO.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Samuel Sidler" <s...@mozilla.com> To: "dev. planning" <dev-plann...@lists.mozilla.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:10:58 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: Re: Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on Windows to WinXP SP3
On Apr 14, 2009, at 5:19 AM, Simon Paquet wrote:
> Do we have any reliable numbers from our own download and AMO > statistics on the percentage of users, which are still using W2K? > I think this discussion would benefit from those numbers.
I, too, would like to see some actual numbers from our user-base (downloads, hits on mozilla.com, ADUs, etc) before making a determination on what we should do about Windows 2000.
> According to Net Applications, both OS X 10.5 and 10.4 are more > popular > than Windows 2000 (6.00% and 2.66% vs. 1.24%).
> Windows 2000 is more popular than Linux (0.90%) and all major mobile > platforms that we currently support or intend to support (Symbian > 0,06% > and Windows CE 0.05%) combined.
> Going from there, I'd also like to see the number of computer users > in the world (or just North America if that isn't possible) that > don't have Firefox and what OS they run. It's a tall task, but the > decision that's being discussed here is pertinent enough to ask for > that IMO.
> Thanks, > Aakash
> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Samuel Sidler" <s...@mozilla.com> > To: "dev. planning" <dev-plann...@lists.mozilla.org> > Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:10:58 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific > Subject: Re: Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on > Windows to WinXP SP3
> On Apr 14, 2009, at 5:19 AM, Simon Paquet wrote:
>> Do we have any reliable numbers from our own download and AMO >> statistics on the percentage of users, which are still using W2K? >> I think this discussion would benefit from those numbers.
> I, too, would like to see some actual numbers from our user-base > (downloads, hits on mozilla.com, ADUs, etc) before making a > determination on what we should do about Windows 2000.
Actually, those are percentages of users, in the world, running a specific OS. They're not the percentages for those running OS' and that don't have Firefox which I was hoping to see. :)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Beltzner" <beltz...@mozilla.com> To: "Aakash Desai" <ade...@mozilla.com>
Cc: "Samuel Sidler" <s...@mozilla.com>, "dev. planning" <dev-plann...@lists.mozilla.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 9:42:00 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: Re: Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on Windows to WinXP SP3
Isn't that what sipaq provided?
> According to Net Applications, both OS X 10.5 and 10.4 are more > popular > than Windows 2000 (6.00% and 2.66% vs. 1.24%).
> Windows 2000 is more popular than Linux (0.90%) and all major mobile > platforms that we currently support or intend to support (Symbian > 0,06% > and Windows CE 0.05%) combined.
cheers, mike
On 14-Apr-09, at 12:27 PM, Aakash Desai wrote:
> Going from there, I'd also like to see the number of computer users > in the world (or just North America if that isn't possible) that > don't have Firefox and what OS they run. It's a tall task, but the > decision that's being discussed here is pertinent enough to ask for > that IMO.
> Thanks, > Aakash
> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Samuel Sidler" <s...@mozilla.com> > To: "dev. planning" <dev-plann...@lists.mozilla.org> > Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:10:58 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific > Subject: Re: Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on > Windows to WinXP SP3
> On Apr 14, 2009, at 5:19 AM, Simon Paquet wrote:
>> Do we have any reliable numbers from our own download and AMO >> statistics on the percentage of users, which are still using W2K? >> I think this discussion would benefit from those numbers.
> I, too, would like to see some actual numbers from our user-base > (downloads, hits on mozilla.com, ADUs, etc) before making a > determination on what we should do about Windows 2000.
On 14-Apr-09, at 5:39 AM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
> On 14/4/09 4:37 PM, Michael Connor wrote: >> Put another way, XP (no SP) and XP SP1 have been unsupported and >> unpatched for years now.
> Those are excellent reasons for dropping support for XP/noSP and XP/ > SP1. But why drop support for XP/SP2?
Because SP2 will reach end of life before 3.5 reaches end of life. Supporting SP2 for 1.9.2 would mean supporting a "dead man walking" OS for at least a year, if not longer.
On Apr 14, 2009, at 9:54 AM, Michael Connor wrote:
> On 14-Apr-09, at 5:39 AM, Robert O'Callahan wrote: >> On 14/4/09 4:37 PM, Michael Connor wrote: >>> Put another way, XP (no SP) and XP SP1 have been unsupported and >>> unpatched for years now.
>> Those are excellent reasons for dropping support for XP/noSP and XP/ >> SP1. But why drop support for XP/SP2?
> Because SP2 will reach end of life before 3.5 reaches end of life. > Supporting SP2 for 1.9.2 would mean supporting a "dead man walking" > OS for at least a year, if not longer.
And? If our users are there, I don't think we should simply drop support because Microsoft has.
I already know the answer, but, uh, have you read through the dropping 10.4 discussion? And the dropping 10.3 discussion before it? I know you have, yet a lot of your statements here are basically what Josh was saying before.
Frankly, without actual data to back the discussion, I don't know why we're even having it now. I saw a couple of things that we'd like to do in SP2 and later. That's fine. Where's the list of things we want to do that are only available in SP3 and later? Where's the data saying 90% of users have upgraded from SP2 to SP3? I'm not sure why we're talking about dropping support for XP SP2 at all yet, especially without strong reasons why.
Are there any estimates out there of the cost of supporting these platforms (in terms of time mostly I guess, maybe code complexity)? What are the metrics from the downloads page on the number of users running Win2K? Just running a quick search through the mozilla-central changelog for Win2K, most things seem related to Win2k3, but I'm no expert. If this is an hour a year of time, I don't see why you wouldn't support it, at least for one more release cycle. Maybe you give them one release cycle of with a warning about "Firefox.next will no longer support your OS" and a quick support page to aid in how to upgrade/information explaining if they even care.
My parents were on rural dial-up for years. 56K modems running at about 5K because of the old phone lines. Auto-updating their OS to SP2 or SP3 was practically impossible, and ordering an upgrade CD... well they didn't even know such a thing existed. They had Firefox installed because I put it on a flash drive one weekend and installed it for them. The cost of upgrading in terms of time/effort was fairly high for them, and I'm guessing there's 2 or 3 million like them in the US alone. But I think they would have taken offense to someone refusing to fix bugs purely as an argument against their OS. It comes off as a "We know better than you" sorta situation. If the cost in Mozilla's time in terms of bug fixes/implementing features is high though (how high is it again?), that doesn't seem nearly as harsh.
> If you don't have the license (i.e. if it was part of a corporate site > license, and you left the company with the machine) then technically you > aren't using the software legally. I suppose there's some number of > people using software without actually having a license to that > software. I don't believe we should make a decision based on users who > can't upgrade their OS because they aren't using it legally.
Taking the problem with a different angle, most of the third world and emerging countries use pirated software, all numbers I have seen about China were saying that +90% software used was pirated and I suspect that XP SP1 is the easiest one to pirate since it didn't include the "genuine advantage" software in it.
Given that security on the net seems to be a low priority concern for users in Asia and the fact that most people use a pirated version of Windows, I think we should evaluate if stopping support for older versions of Windows is not going to hinder our growth in emerging markets and specifically China (basically asking Mozilla China if they have some insight on the matter).
> On Apr 14, 2009, at 5:19 AM, Simon Paquet wrote:
>> Do we have any reliable numbers from our own download and AMO >> statistics on the percentage of users, which are still using W2K? >> I think this discussion would benefit from those numbers.
> I, too, would like to see some actual numbers from our user-base > (downloads, hits on mozilla.com, ADUs, etc) before making a > determination on what we should do about Windows 2000.
What you really want is the trend data, I would think, since what we're making a decision on is based on how many users will still be using that OS version when 3.5 hits EOL. If we ship .next sometime next spring, we're talking late 2010 before those users lack a supported browser version. Right now, we're at similar numbers to the Net Applications numbers. Between now and then we'll see Windows 7 ship, which always spurs a new round of hardware upgrades and trickle- down, plus a year or more of the natural trend for hardware to die and be replaced (again, remember that we're dealing with 2004-era hardware at best, so a lot of computers are reaching end of natural life). I don't doubt that some people will be left behind, but we gave up 4% of our users who were on Win98 when we dropped Win9x support for 3.0, so Win2k is already way under that threshold.
> On Apr 14, 2009, at 9:54 AM, Michael Connor wrote: >> On 14-Apr-09, at 5:39 AM, Robert O'Callahan wrote: >>> On 14/4/09 4:37 PM, Michael Connor wrote: >>>> Put another way, XP (no SP) and XP SP1 have been unsupported and >>>> unpatched for years now.
>>> Those are excellent reasons for dropping support for XP/noSP and >>> XP/SP1. But why drop support for XP/SP2?
>> Because SP2 will reach end of life before 3.5 reaches end of life. >> Supporting SP2 for 1.9.2 would mean supporting a "dead man walking" >> OS for at least a year, if not longer.
> And? If our users are there, I don't think we should simply drop > support because Microsoft has.
If our users are happy running an insecure OS with no updates, they can run the last version of 3.5 as well. If we do have users there, it is in their best interests to upgrade to SP3 and continue to receive security updates for their systems. Unless they really really like spyware and being used as a spam gateway.
> I already know the answer, but, uh, have you read through the > dropping 10.4 discussion? And the dropping 10.3 discussion before > it? I know you have, yet a lot of your statements here are basically > what Josh was saying before.
I was the one who made the final call on 10.3, of course. For 10.4, of course, there's some significant differences. Win2k is a lot fewer users than 10.4 (10.4 has 3x the number of users as Win2k), the timeframe is a lot longer (10 year old OS, replaced 8.5 years before EOL, last widely sold on PCs around 2002, though some could be as new as five years old), and Microsoft provides a finite date for the end of actual patch support, instead of requiring guessing on our part. We know that after that date, users will be vulnerable and unprotected, and we know that even a current OS without patches is vulnerable when connected to the internet. All of these things are real data points.
> Frankly, without actual data to back the discussion, I don't know > why we're even having it now. I saw a couple of things that we'd > like to do in SP2 and later. That's fine. Where's the list of things > we want to do that are only available in SP3 and later? Where's the > data saying 90% of users have upgraded from SP2 to SP3? I'm not sure > why we're talking about dropping support for XP SP2 at all yet, > especially without strong reasons why.
There's plenty of data. Predicting the state of OS versions for when 3.5 reaches EOL is going to be fairly imprecise, but win2k's share after July 2010 is likely to be tiny, declining, and heavily zombified.
SP2 vs. SP3 isn't especially interesting, but I would rather have a policy around ensuring that we support OS versions through their EOL, but not beyond. That's the best tradeoff between resources and users I can think of.
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Michael Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote: > That's the best tradeoff between resources and users I can think of.
I think what people are missing -- including myself -- is what the resource cost _is_ for supporting SP3. I don't think we gain anything by being doctrinaire about OS support, though I'm fully in favour of making economic choices to ensure that we don't bear costs out of proportion with their returns.
It seems like moving to SP3 is just for the sake of moving to SP3, and not because it actually gains us anything on the development or support side. The < SP2 and Win2K cases are much clearer, so it may well be that there's just something about supporting SP3 that I'm missing.
> Le 14.04.2009 08:10, Michael Connor a écrit : >> If you don't have the license (i.e. if it was part of a corporate >> site >> license, and you left the company with the machine) then >> technically you >> aren't using the software legally. I suppose there's some number of >> people using software without actually having a license to that >> software. I don't believe we should make a decision based on users >> who >> can't upgrade their OS because they aren't using it legally.
> Taking the problem with a different angle, most of the third world > and emerging countries use pirated software, all numbers I have seen > about China were saying that +90% software used was pirated and I > suspect that XP SP1 is the easiest one to pirate since it didn't > include the "genuine advantage" software in it.
> Given that security on the net seems to be a low priority concern > for users in Asia and the fact that most people use a pirated > version of Windows, I think we should evaluate if stopping support > for older versions of Windows is not going to hinder our growth in > emerging markets and specifically China (basically asking Mozilla > China if they have some insight on the matter).
I think it's entirely possible that it will hinder our growth in those areas. I am not at all convinced that we want to target pirated software to succeed in our mission. I think it's a bad position to take for mozilla.org, and I have moral and ethical issues around effectively supporting piracy by making decisions to ensure that users of illegal software can use our product.
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Michael Connor > <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote: >> That's the best tradeoff between resources and users I can think of.
> I think what people are missing -- including myself -- is what the > resource cost _is_ for supporting SP3. I don't think we gain anything > by being doctrinaire about OS support, though I'm fully in favour of > making economic choices to ensure that we don't bear costs out of > proportion with their returns.
> It seems like moving to SP3 is just for the sake of moving to SP3, and > not because it actually gains us anything on the development or > support side. The < SP2 and Win2K cases are much clearer, so it may > well be that there's just something about supporting SP3 that I'm > missing.
It's actually pretty likely that supporting SP2 is not much different from SP3. That's the current baseline for IE7/8 and Chrome, so I'm fine with that, at least for now, and we can watch to see whether they change their baselines once SP2 reaches end of life. Of course, getting a working SP2 install after next July will be more complicated, but that's why we have MSDN subscriptions, I guess!
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Michael Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote: > I think it's entirely possible that it will hinder our growth in those > areas. I am not at all convinced that we want to target pirated software to > succeed in our mission. I think it's a bad position to take for > mozilla.org, and I have moral and ethical issues around effectively > supporting piracy by making decisions to ensure that users of illegal > software can use our product.
That's a fine discussion to have, but we should have it before we decide how to use or not use such data in deciding operating system support. Especially when the vendor of the operating system itself has taken varying stances on how or whether to support unlicensed copies with security updates. The security of those users running pirated software is not just an issue for them, but has pretty wide-ranging effects on the security of other internet users as well.
> illegally using their OS and cannot upgrade due to that, I do not want to >> have to bend over backwards to recreate their environment to reproduce the >> bug and test a fix (in addition, there are moral issues with helping these
> I think there is a large gap between "continue to support XP SP3 on 1.9.2" > and "bend over backwards". Of course maybe I should try yoga.
I wasn't suggesting that we drop XP entirely for 1.9.2 (in more than a few years, we probably will). Supporting XP < SP2 (or worse, systems where people "remove IE") is bending over backwards because it is almost like a different OS (APIs and behaviors are different).
> of the vast majority of users who are using their OS legally and properly >> maintaining it.
> users). I would argue that supporting those systems doesn't help the needs
> But do you really want to base decisions on morality? Shall we ask users to > certify that their machine is being used legally and has been dusted > regularly? They never surf to sites on a mozilla-do-not-visit list? Always > properly shutdown at night?
Morality is not the only factor in making a decision and I never said it was the base for all of mine or should be for everyone. In fact, I never said or implied any of those things you listed there.
I don't think any of this is mozilla's business. The only issue is the
> number of users of XP SP2.
It is if they have put their machine in a state that is unsupported or unstable due to these activities. We don't fix the bugs in the download scanner that resulted from people "uninstalling IE" and I don't think you will find many people who disagree with that policy.
> It seems like moving to SP3 is just for the sake of moving to SP3, and > not because it actually gains us anything on the development or > support side.
SP3 is two things, a chunk of updates that you probably already got from Windows Update, but could have declined:
* MMC 3.0, nothing to do with us * MSXML 6, nothing to do with us (I hope) * Windows Installer 3.1, nothing to do with us the way things seem to be going * BITS 2.5, I'd be surprised if we decided to use it instead of rolling our own * IPSec Simple Policy Update, nothing to do with us * Digital Identity Management Service, nothing to do with us * Peer Name Resolution Protocol, nothing to do with us * RDP 6.1, nothing to do with us * WPA2, a stretch to claim it's to do with us
and a chunk of new things:
* better black hole router detection, nothing to do with us * Network Access Protection, nothing to do with us * CredSSP, nothing to do with us
So unless I'm misunderstanding one of the things which sound like they are only about interactions with Windows servers on your Window LAN, requiring SP3 would be an entirely non-technical choice unless we plan on doing an .msi *and* using a feature that was in the 3.1 update, or using BITS for background downloads.
> I don't think any of this is mozilla's business. The only issue is the >> number of users of XP SP2.
> It is if they have put their machine in a state that is unsupported or > unstable due to these activities.
I think it would be helpful if someone can enumerate the reasons why XP SP2 is unsupportable or unstable for 1.9.2. Mike Connor's proposal cited Microsoft's EOL policy at the reason. I don't think this is enough of a reason, because Microsoft updates beyond SP2 are not easy nor valuable. But perhaps there are other reasons?
<johnjbar...@johnjbarton.com> wrote: > I think it would be helpful if someone can enumerate the reasons why XP SP2 > is unsupportable or unstable for 1.9.2. Mike Connor's proposal cited > Microsoft's EOL policy at the reason. I don't think this is enough of a > reason, because Microsoft updates beyond SP2 are not easy nor valuable. But > perhaps there are other reasons?
Did you see Mike's reply to my later in this thread, agreeing that SP2 was an OK baseline?
>> I don't think any of this is mozilla's business. The only issue is the >>> number of users of XP SP2.
>> It is if they have put their machine in a state that is unsupported or >> unstable due to these activities.
> I think it would be helpful if someone can enumerate the reasons why > XP SP2 is unsupportable or unstable for 1.9.2. Mike Connor's proposal > cited Microsoft's EOL policy at the reason. I don't think this is > enough of a reason, because Microsoft updates beyond SP2 are not easy > nor valuable. But perhaps there are other reasons?
It's not about being "unsupportable" so much as "a platform which will rapidly be exploited" given that it won't get security updates.
