[HEADSUP] Phasing out old Windows versions and 32 bit support

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Oct 27 13:36, Jeremy Drake via Cygwin wrote:
> Oops, forgot to send to list.
> 
> On Wed, 27 Oct 2021, Takashi Yano wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 26 Oct 2021 22:55:01 +0200
> > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > We're also planning to drop Support for the 32 bit release of Cygwin in
> > > 2022, thus Cygwin 3.4.0 won't come in 32 bit anymore, and the package
> > > maintainers won't have to update 32 bit packages anymore.  If you're
> > > still running Cygwin under WOW64, consider to move to 64 bit in the next
> > > couple of months.
> >
> > I agree with you that 32 bit cygwin under WOW64 is not worth to
> > support any more. However, 32 bit version of Windows 10 will be
> > still supported at least until Oct. 2025. Personally, I think it
> > would not be nice to exclude the supported windows version from
> > cygwin support.
> 
> Please also note that Windows on ARM64 only just got the ability to run
> x86_64 binaries in Windows 11.  Previously the only option was 32-bit
> x86, as there is no native ARM port of Cygwin.  I don't know about Cygwin
> directly, but I know there are users of Git for Windows on ARM.
> 
> I think a more gradual sunsetting of 32-bit might be a resonable
> compromise, based on the original wording:

Ripping out 32 bit code to clean up the code base (and, typically,
finding bugs in the 64 bit code while doing that) is something I'm
planning for the end of 2022 or early 2023, so there's enough time left.

And just because the latest version of Cygwin doesn't run on Vista/W7/
32 bit systems anymore, doesn't mean they can't run Cygwin anymore.
Older release will still be available for a time on cygwin.com, and
more or less infinitely via Peter's time machine.


Corinna