Windows 9x support

Hey folks - got a bit of a request. My request is this: if you a) are a
crack Windows hacker, and b) care about Windows 9x (that is, 95, 98, ME)
- speak now or forever hold your peace.

As it stands right now, GLIB 2.14+ doesn't work properly with AbiWord on
these versions of Windows (requiring a hacky workaround, see [1])
meaning that all 2.6 releases through now have been 9x-incompatible with
a nearly complete lack of feedback. (The exclusion being a thread on
abiword user with a couple of users that eventually resulted in the
above-mentioned bug.)

In the course of researching this issue, I found that [2] undo hasn't
worked right on 9x in more or less forever (since 2.1.x) which explains
why every doc (including the default empty one) in my 98 vm opens up
dirtied. Furthermore, "uwog: 1.25% from the hits on abisource.com is
from win9x users". Given that my time is limited, more common platforms
have bigger issues for me to deal with, Win 9x compatibility is stop
energy for unicode on Windows, and recent versions work on Win9x
reasonably well with some hackarounds (that is, win9x users have
_something_ reasonable to use) I propose the following: Drop official
win9x support. (I will personally say that this is a for-sure from 2.8
on for me.) The only condition under which I would change my mind is if
some hacker meeting both a and b above steps up and takes care of the
issues needed to keep it spinning, including the packaging improvements
to include the "workaround" by default.

PS - if you meet just (a), please speak up! I can point you in the
right direction to make some improvements on Windows, and thousands of
users every month will silently thank you!

Ryan

[1] http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11542
[2] http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6852

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com
#282  +  (442) -  [X]
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;