[ros-dev] Targeting multiple Windows versions

[Richard Campbell]

his may seem good, but down the road you'll run into issues.  Probably 
one of the most obvious issues is if a user develops his application on 
ROS.  If he makes use of these vista only APIs then suddenly his app 
doesn't work on Windows.  Another reason is application developers do 
funky things.  They've been known to check for certain entry points in a 
DLL.  If said DLL has the entry point they may wrongfully assume they 
are running on vista and start making use of VISTA APIs.  If this 
happens and ROS doesn't support ALL the vista APIs then the app will 
more then likely crash.

I don't even go into the issue of bloat (wasted disk space, memory, etc.)

A solution to this would be to disable the compilation of these items 
unless a flag is turned on.  That way vista compatibility could still be 
enabled at a future date when the api is mature.

David Hinz wrote:
> Marc Piulachs schrieb:
>   
>> I know it means more work but I see this as a strategic decision, in the
>> future reactos can benefit from massive demand of companies moving away from
>> old unsupported Oss like NT4 or Windows 2000 seeking a modern OS that will
>> run their unmodified NT4 applications or drivers.
>>     
> And why does this mean we can't support new features, when they don't 
> conflict with older things?
>
> I really don't get your point...
>
> The problem I see with sticking to one WinAPI version for some time 
> (even if the successor is already released) is, that we're always way 
> behind Windows and that's not good if we want to be an alternative.
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