[GNC-dev] GnuCash 4 Minimum Versions (was: Building on Windows)

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 27, 2019, at 10:19 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op dinsdag 27 augustus 2019 19:00:59 CEST schreef John Ralls:
>> 
>> Win7 goes out of support at the end of the year, meaning only really serious
>> security bugs will be fixed (as happened recently with XP). You really
>> should upgrade soon.
>> 
> Will GnuCash stop supporting Win7 as well by that time ? That's my only reason 
> to stick to that old platform.

I think we should set GnuCash 4's minimum support at least at Win8.1, which EOLs 1 October 2023. Win8 EOLed 2 years after 8.1's general release in 2013 [1]. But we might consider skipping that and making it Win10 because even 8.1 is getting security updates only since last year. Win10 was released 29 July 2015 so that would be consistent with the Ubuntu 16.04 minimum on Linux. FWIW to be consistent we'd set MacOS at 10.11 El Capitan.

With Win10 MS has moved to a sort of continuous integration model where it's essentially impossible to be connected to the net and be more than a few weeks out of date. I'm not sure whether "minimum supported version" is meaningful in that environment.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/15347/announcing-windows-8-1-support-lifecycle-policy