[Lazarus] Inno Setup no longer supports Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Bart wrote:
> On 8/3/12, Reinier Olislagers <reinierolislagers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Yep. Presumably changing over to (some less resource intensive version -
>> i.e. older or non-mainstream - of) Linux would be possible but would
>> still involve retraining costs/effort.
> 
> But old machines probably only can run old Linux distro's.
> My 11 year old Celeron 700Mhz with 512MB RAM runs Suse 10.0, but I
> must admit that it is stretching the limit.

Since I typically run older hardware, I crave indulgence to point out 
that that's not strictly correct. In general, I'd expect a machine of 
that vintage to run a recent distro, but /not/ necessarily to run a 
recent desktop (alias, these days, window manager). I'd expect something 
like Debian Squeeze plus xfce to be OK on anything half-decent, on the 
other hand I'd expect even recent hardware to render its default desktop 
badly if asked to do so over e.g. a remote X link (including ssh 
tunneling) or VNC.

By "half-decent" above, I specifically exclude:

* Anything with fewer than 256 colours, or with a screen smaller than 
1024x768.

* On PCs, anything predating the PC-99 standard.

* On PCs, anything with MCA, even if nominally compliant with PC-99.

* On PCs, anything that claims to be a fully PCI system but is actually 
based on EISA (older Compaq servers fall into this category), even if 
nominally compliant with PC-99.

> With old distro's come old widgetsets.
> My GTK2 is 2.8, which already is driving Zeljan insane (many thanks to
> him for adjusting code for this version).

If the decimal is an issue, would it be possible to get the Lazarus 
version splash to display it, or to have detected library versions 
accessible somewhere? If I were doing a support job I'd definitely want 
a caller to be able to get this info easily.

> I sympathize with Graeme and his users.
> OTOH maintaining Win9x/WinMe support is gonna be a huge task, and
> who's gonna volunteer for that?

In the context of Lazarus, I have somewhat less sympathy for '9x 
(strictly: the Win-32 API implemented by OSes other than the NT family) 
than I do with older OSes such as W2K and NT. The reason for this is 
that Lazarus and the LCL are, to a very large extent, a development 
environment and class library paralleling Delphi; one of Delphi's major 
selling points has always been good support for threads and as such it 
would be unreasonable to expect it to be fully implemented on '9x, so 
why should Lazarus try to do better?

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]