[python-win32] About support for Windows XP and Internet Explorer, and possible leftover code

[Mark Hammond]

On 2024-03-18 1:57 a.m., Samuel Therrien wrote:
> I've been wondering, what's the state, intent, or policy on support 
> for older OSes? I haven't seen it be mentioned (for example on the 
> readme), yet still see a handle of areas of code referencing support 
> for older OSes (XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, CE, ...), but also commits and PRs 
> dropping support for them (at least building with 8.1 SDKs is dropped).
>
> I'd assume to be "whatever still has a non-EOL CPython version that 
> can be installed", but maybe not?

Yep, that's correct. As you note, dropping support for building using 
older SDKs is dropped more aggressively, but that generally doesn't 
prevent things running on those older OSs.


>
> On a technical level, I'm also wondering if winxpgui and winxptheme 
> actually serve any purpose anymore?
>
>  *
>     winxpgui seems to be some patched-up win32gui for XP?
>  *
>     I'm not sure what winxptheme is exactly. I'm not able to do much
>     with it. I guess "the Windows XP 'theme' API" is some old Windows
>     stuff that never quite went away in the background.
>
These were split to support older OS versions back in the day, but 
there's no longer a need given we no longer support XP at all. However, 
for backwards compatibility we can't really drop the names - IOW, these 
could all technically be rolled into a single .pyd, but `from winxpgui 
import foo` must continue to work somehow for all `foo` it worked for in 
the past.

>
> As for Internet Explorer, technically there's a mode in Edge to allow 
> some sites to run pages in "IE mode" (that thing really won't die, 
> will it?), but that's still through the Edge application.
> The iebutton and ietoolbar demos technically do install an addon that 
> I can see and enable in "Internet Settings", but idk if they can 
> really do anything (and as such, if the demos are still valid).

In that case I see no reason to not consider them valid.


Cheers,


Mark
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