[Lazarus] Phasing out support for Windows 98 and Windows ME

[Bart]

Dear Lazarus users,

The Lazarus team has decided to finally phase out support for the
Windows 9x platform.

Reasons for doing so are:
1) The platform is not supported anymore by Microsoft.
2) The platform is hardly in use anymore.
3) The new 3.0 series compiler does not support this platform anymore.
4) There is only 1 maintainer of the Windows 9x code base.
5) Cleaning up the Win32 widgetset code will make it easier to
maintain and less prone to bugs.

The phasing out wil take place in 2 stages:

Stage 1.
Starting with the upcoming Lazarus 1.6 there will be no more active
development in the code that was specifically written for dealing with
the Window 9x platform.

However, patches (when supplied in the bugtracker) for bugs in this
code can still be applied to the 1.6 fixes branch.

It may (or may not) be necessary to build your application using the
2.6.4 compiler in order to get a functional Windows 9x application.

Stage 2.
Starting with the 1.7 development branch (AKA trunk) all code that was
specifically written for the Windows 9x platform will be removed from
our codebase.
>From that point on software written with this version (or later) of
Lazarus will most likely either not run at all, or not run as expected
on the Windows 9x platform.

We are aware of the fact that this decision may affect a niche group
of Lazarus users who develop for end-uses that still run Windows 98,
but these can still use the 1.6 branch of Lazarus.

Bart