Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

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palacs
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Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

Hi there,

I suppose there will be no more releases from the 2.8 (oldstable) branch, however I'm curious if it is meant to receive backports of critical/security/crash fixes like the latest commit on GitHub from 2015?

Best
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doublemax
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by doublemax »

Very unlikely. The wxWidgets team itself won't make any fixes for 2.8.x. But if users provide a patch, there is a chance it gets applied.

However, 2.8.12 is seven years old now, e.g. under Windows is has no support for Windows 8 or 10 and should be avoided.

Try to migrade your project to 3.x, depending on the size of the project and your wxWidgets knowledge this may take from 10 minutes to a few hours, but it's worth the effort.
Use the source, Luke!
palacs
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

What If I would like to write an application that is functional under Windows 98 as well as on Windows 10?

Which branch would you recommend?

What exactly needs to be supported under Windows 8 in wxWidgets?
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by ONEEYEMAN »

palacs,
Windows98 is really outdated. You won't have any customers for it. ;-)
Generally speaking, anything that is less than a Vista should not be currently supported. The life cycle for Windows 9x ended 10 or so years ago.

Is there a reason why you need such a support?

Thank you.
palacs
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

Well, for example if I want to support computers that won't run with newer OSes. But I don't want to open this "is newer better" argument.

I just want to know which wx branch is the most unlikely to have bugs. I thought of 2.8 because it's old enough to have all possible bugs been fixed. New features bring in new bugs. However, I compiled apps with wX 3.X and they're fine on Windows 98, compiled with VS2005.
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by ONEEYEMAN »

palacs,
You can use the compiler < MSVC 2010 with 3.x.

Keep in mind though that official support even in wxWidgets for < WinXP SP2 and < OSX 10.7 was ended in 3.1. You should be able to work with 3.0 though and be able to file bugs and issues against wxWidgets. Also, 3.0 does not support MSVC 6.0 anymore.

And of course you will need to do an extensive testing with such an old OS.

Thank you.
palacs
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

So as far as I see my best choice would be 3.0.X which is still supported (bugs will get fixed) and I can compile it using MSVC 8.0 (2005).

If < WinXP SP2 support ended from 3.1, which is the minimum version of Windows that 3.0.X will support (e.g. 95, 98, etc.)?
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by ONEEYEMAN »

palacs,
I think it is 95 as it is the minimum which MSVC 6 supported.

What you can do is check the Git history and see for yourself.

Thank you.
palacs
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

Sounds promising. Thank you.
palacs
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by palacs »

Did some tests with 3.0.2 and 2.8.12 using the compiler of Visual Studio Express 2005.

The results are a bit disappointing.

A binary compiled with 3.0.2 seems to be twice the size of the one compiled with 2.8.12

A lot of sample applications load and work faster in 2.8.12 than in 3.0.2.

Isn't it possible to keep 2.8.12 supported with only bug fixes?
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by doublemax »

A binary compiled with 3.0.2 seems to be twice the size of the one compiled with 2.8.12
The new library is bigger, a minimal sample should see an increase of about 1.7mb to 3.0mb (static linking). But this difference is constant. So, if you have a "real" application, the difference might be 8mb to 9.3mb. Beware that 3.x has debug information enabled even in release builds, set wxDEBUG_LEVEL to 0 in setup.h (there is a section already that needs to be uncommented) and do a rebuild.
A lot of sample applications load and work faster in 2.8.12 than in 3.0.2.
I find that very hard to believe. And if it should be in the area of milliseconds, certainly not something you can notice.
Isn't it possible to keep 2.8.12 supported with only bug fixes?
2.8.12 is seven years old, e.g. has no support for Vista or higher Windows versions etc.
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Re: Will the 2.8 branch receive maintenance fixes?

Post by ONEEYEMAN »

Hi,
Also, there is no GTK+3 and proper Cocoa support.

But more so, there are ways to decrease the size of executable - either with turning off some unneeded options and recompiling the library or zipping p the executable.

Thank you.
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