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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:52:08 -0600
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
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Subject: Windows Support philosophy for trunk/2.4 release
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Some might have noticed I've been busy eliminating Win9x support from trunk.

The essential logic is that the 9x/ME family has been retired from even
extended support for some time, no security updates are forthcoming, and
the code path was altogether different than the NT generation.

The one feature lost, Win32DisableAcceptEx, will be replaced by the listen
logic recognizing three AcceptFilter modes on windows

  * none - fall back on WSP accept and do no pre-fetching (should be even
    more compatible than the old 9x code path with fewer quirks when using
    bogus WSP socket drivers).

  * connect - what AcceptEx does today, pass all connection info back in
    through the accept completion context.

  * data - AcceptEx + initial data packet(s).

I should be done with this in a bit, but in any case the old code just
needed to be eliminated for purposes of the alpha releases.

For Windows NT SP6, it is beyond all extended online self-support periods
and once we have a reason, we should simply break it (but not go out of
our way to do so.)

For Windows 2000 SP4, we are in its extended support period until 2010.
Again, we shouldn't go out of our way to break it, and if we can avoid this
for another year or two, let's be kind.  But if we really hit the wall and
must - then it's not unreasonable to break it to solve a real issue.

Bill