What's the oldest MS VC version Parrot should built with?

[Geoffrey Broadwell]

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 20:10 +0000, Vadim Konovalov wrote:
> Again, Jan's explanation:
> http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-03/msg00725.html
> 
> With different CRT you'll get unneeded bloat, and new CRT could not yet be 
> installed on target OS, so in newer VC you need to provide user with 
> instructions how to install CRT for VC9.
> 
> WinXP+SP3 do have lates VC runtime, while pure WinXP could not!

It's not uncommon for applications to require certain minimum Windows
Service Packs.  I don't think it's unreasonable for Parrot to do so as
well, especially since:

1.  It would allow us to use a current compiler, while still not
bloating our install.

2.  Anyone not running a current SP is probably running an insecure
system.  I consider it a net win for the world to strongly encourage
users to at least *minimally* secure their systems.

3.  There may be a few users who cannot use a patched up version of
Windows for whatever reason, usually because they must support
production software that cannot handle the upgrade.  Given that Parrot
1.0 is explicitly *NOT* for production use, I don't believe there's much
likelihood of a large intersection between systems running Parrot 1.0
and systems that cannot run current OS patches.

> the point I've raised is not choosing between GCC(mingv) and VC9, but rather 
> why it could be desireable to not drop VC6 support, provided that there will 
> be VC9 support anyway.

How about this:

*PROVIDED SOMEONE ACTS AS MAINTAINER*, we support VC6 for users to
manually build with, but it's not the compiler we use for default
prebuilt Windows binaries.  For these, we can use VC9, and require Vista
or WinXP SP3. [1]

Is that an acceptable compromise?


-'f

[1] Mind you, I'd prefer to build with only open source tools, but it's
unclear to me that that is a reasonable default on Windows.  If it *is*
reasonable to make gcc our default compiler on Windows, then we should
-- all others become "supported for user builds".