Build agent musings

You may or may not know that we have automated builds covering all sorts for platforms. I’ll do a more thorough list later, but we currently only do builds on Windows 11.

With all the privacy concerns and what not being expressed with the End of 10 I’m wondering if we should spin up a Windows 10 agent just to make sure we’re covering users that might stick around on it.

Thoughts?

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To quote yourself “We’re not targeting LTS distributions” why would we target a stale version of Windows?

Beyond that I’m not sure it would make much of a difference since we build using MinGW, no? As of right now it doesn’t seem like they have different releases targeting Win10 or Win11.

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These are all fair points :wink:

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While Windows 10 will receive extended support for an additional year for consumers and 3 years for businesses that pay, I don’t really see a point considering that the support comes in the form of only security patches. There won’t be any changes that affect applications. And as @ivanhoe mentions, the fact that we’re using MinGW and the gcc in there means we’re targeting the versions of libraries that are actually exactly the same between Windows 10 and Windows 11. The msvcrt.dll that MinGW builds against, for example, has been frozen in time since Windows 2000, receiving only rare security patches in the last 25 years.

To summarize, I think having a Windows 11 build agent covers our needs. Having Windows 10 around feels like it’s just adding overhead for no reason. And we can always publish an official policy stating that we only support Windows operating systems in the “Mainstream Support” phase, which currently means only Windows 11, Windows Server 2022, and Windows Server 2025.

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