Eryk Sun <eryk...@gmail.com> added the comment:

> I'm not sure that there is a big benefit for us to drop Windows 8 
> support (only Windows 8 but continue to support Windows 8.1), 
> compared to the annoyance for users.

According to statcounter.com and netmarketshare.com, Windows 8 still has 1% or 
less of the desktop market (across all platforms), while Windows 8.1 has about 
5%. In comparison, Windows 7 has about 25-30% share, and Windows 10 has about 
45-50%. I expect to see complaints about dropping Windows 7 support in 3.9. 
It's still quite popular and may take longer to die off than even Windows XP. I 
don't expect much noise, if any at all, about dropping Windows 8. Microsoft 
hasn't supported it for over 3 years.

A minor benefit of requiring Windows 8.1 would be support for process 
snapshotting (*). We could re-implement win32_getppid based on 
PssCaptureSnapshot and PssQuerySnapshot. This would only snapshot basic 
information about the current process (a few NtQueryInformationProcess system 
calls), whereas a Toolhelp snapshot, as is currently used, captures information 
about every process and thread in every session. Like I said, it's a minor 
benefit -- especially if we make the parent pid a static variable, so it only 
has to be looked up once. But this also opens up other features provided by 
this facility, including walking the handle table and virtual memory, if 
someone finds a use for them.

(*) For some reason ProcessSnapshot.h requires NTDDI_WIN8 instead 
NTDDI_WINBLUE, so this isn't actually a case for changing the value of  
Py_NTDDI, but it should be in principle. The docs for process snapshotting 
require Windows 8.1, and the Windows 8 version of kernel32.dll (6.2.9200.*) 
does not export any of the Pss* functions, so it really was/is not available in 
Windows 8 as far as I can tell.

----------

_______________________________________
Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue32592>
_______________________________________
_______________________________________________
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

Reply via email to