Dmitry Timoshkov:
If I understand the philosophy of Wine correctly, it is to provide an alternative to the Microsoft implementation of the platform. The criteria for success is that applications written to run on the current Microsoft platform can run on Wine. To that end mandatory support for the Windows 9X and other older versions was removed from the patch acceptance test procedure. The test procedures were also to be simplified when a change touched on one of the special cases where the special provisions for older versions was part of a test.
However, certain things were not to be done:
The ABILITY to test under older versions is to be retained. Such testing is no longer required, but the tests are supposed to be available on request.
Simply removing support for older versions in tests is not sufficient reason for changing a test. Something else about the test has to change before there is justification of stripping out special case code.
Gratuitous removal of support for older versions in the actual Wine code is not acceptable. There has to be a reason for breaking support of older applications.
We are NOT trying to support Microsoft's effort to force their customers to upgrade to new versions of Microsoft's products. In fact, my understanding is that Wine is intended to provide an 'as good as or better' alternative to Microsoft. Efforts to improve Wine's ability to support current applications is very important, but supporting older applications is also useful.
Max