Should we sunset Windows 7 support?

[Laslo Hunhold]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 13:27:20 +0100
"Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason at zx2c4.com> wrote:

Dear Jason,

> Windows 7 has been EOL'd by Microsoft since January of this year. It
> is no longer receiving security updates or fixes. This email is to get
> the conversation started about doing the same with WireGuard for
> Windows.
> [...] Do we really want to keep maintaining gross stuff like this? It
> makes me uncomfortable to have kludges like that sitting around in
> the code. Shouldn't I write an auto-downloader that then checks
> hashes? Shouldn't I build this into the installer? Shouldn't I....
> waste tons of time supporting Windows 7 better?
> 
> Probably not.
> 
> But I know so many users are still using Windows 7. I'd like to hear
> from you to understand why, in order to assess when is the right
> moment to sunset our Windows 7 support.
> 
> So, if you care for Windows 7, please pipe up! We're not going to
> remove support for it overnight, and we're not prepared yet to
> announce any sort of formal deprecation plan, but the world is moving
> on at some point.

this is a really difficult judgement to make, which comes up every time
Microsoft EOLs an operating system, because it really often is still
heavily used.

My stance is that we as open source developers don't owe anybody
anything, and if Windows 7 users really care about WireGuard they can
create, share and maintain a patchset that implements the fixes
themselves. You shouldn't be the one paying the price (i.e. time spent)
because people insist on using an EOL'd operating system, which
presents a security issue in many other aspects as well. If they can't
do it themselves, they could pay somebody to deal with such a patchset,
or just keep running the last supported version of WireGuard.

In an utilitarian sense, because you're losing time over Windows 7
support, everyone else is negatively affected, because it's time you
could spend on aspects of WireGuard everyone benefits from, and not
only those running an EOL'd operating system.

To put it shortly, I'm completely in support of sunsetting Windows 7
support, or even just keeping the Windows-7-changes in the next release
for one last time and then immediately dropping them right afterwards
in the git-master. I'm not sure what you exactly mean with sunsetting,
which is why I've given the above "drastic" proposal in case sunsetting
means dealing with this nonsense for another year or something.

With best regards

Laslo Hunhold