On Mon, Feb 07, 2022 at 01:38:17PM +0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 1:16 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 04, 2022 at 05:20:31PM +0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 8:18 PM Kevin Kofler via devel <
> > > devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > For the record:
> > > >
> > > > https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/#msvcrt-vs-ucrt states:
> > > > > MSVCRT […] Works out of the box on every Microsoft Windows versions.
> > > >
> > > > This is not entirely true. MSVCRT.DLL was introduced in Windows 95 OSR
> > 2.
> > > > The original Windows 95, with or without the only service pack released
> > > > for
> > > > it (SP1, because OSR 2 was not released as a service pack, only as an
> > "OEM
> > > > service release" for new computers), shipped only the even older
> > > > CRTDLL.DLL
> > > > (which MinGW stopped supporting years ago) out of the box, MSVCRT.DLL
> > had
> > > > to
> > > > be installed through a redistributable (which was included with many
> > > > applications including Microsoft Office, but it was not part of the
> > > > operating system).
> > > >
> > > > But yes, for Windows releases ≥ 95 OSR 2 and < 10 (and no, Windows
> > version
> > > > numbers are not anywhere near monotonic ;-) ), MSVCRT is included out
> > of
> > > > the
> > > > box, UCRT is not. Is it really a good default to depend on a runtime
> > > > library
> > > > that is only included in Windows ≥ 10?
> > > >
> > >
> > > This proposal doesn't change the default. Although we can discuss whether
> > > deprecating msvcrt support in Fedora-MinGW would make sense today.
> >
> > There's a variety of sites claiming to have stats on different
> > Windows versions. They all show Windows 10 with the majority,
> > but disagree on just how much older stuff still gets used. As
> > one example though, this shows Windows 7 with 12 % and
> > Windows 8.1 on 3 %.  That 15% is too significant to declare
> > that MSVCRT is deprecated yet.
> >
> >
> > https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/
>
>
> FYI, UCRT can be installed on various Windows:
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows-c0514201-7fe6-95a3-b0a5-287930f3560c

Can be done automatically by the application's own MSI/NSIS installer ?
Requiring the users to do that separately is not desirable.

> We should also look at the cost/benefit for Fedora to ship and maintain
> MSVCRT environments.

Or we could look at the cost/benefit of adding UCRT to Fedora, since
that's the change being proposed in this thread. In this thread

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/mingw@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6G2EAKYSNWMLDBWZ2BYQS3BEIRKJ2EEG/

you're proposing that Fedora stop shipping any mingw packages at all,
and just rely on MSys2 to do the packaging work. If that is the desired
solution, is it actually a benefit to spend any effort adding -ucrt64
sub-RPMs to every mingw package in Fedora today ?