Re: [icu-design] [icu-support] Drop Windows XP and OSX 10.6 support

[Markus S. <mar...@gm...>]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Steven Loomis <sr...@ic...> wrote:

> Jonathan and other users,
>  Please comment on whether dropping Windows XP for ICU 58 will cause
> significant problems.
>  We discussed this for 57 (as per below) but no code changes were made.
>

For ICU 57, we were just thinking of removing some Windows XP-specific
 synchronization code. We decided to just keep that for 57.

For ICU 58, we are looking at switching more code over to Windows Vista/7/8
APIs because Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 only support i18n APIs with
LCID parameters and cannot support some languages at all. Newer Windows
versions added APIs that take language tag strings. This is important for
an i18n library on a major platform...

For how long do you plan to support Windows XP past October 2016? Could you
stay on ICU 57/CLDR 29/Unicode 8 until you stop supporting Windows XP?

Also, Windows Vista seems to have very low market share and seems to be
getting dropped by vendors around the same time they drop XP.
Is it ok to skip Vista and set Windows 7 as the new base for ICU 58?

Best regards,
markus