Should we sunset Windows 7 support?

[Reiner Karlsberg]

Am 10.11.2020 um 14:27 schrieb Jason A. Donenfeld:
> Hi,
> 
> 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.
> 
> Supporting Windows 7 is an ongoing maintenance burden. For example, we
> use SHA2 signatures instead of SHA1 signatures for our drivers, which
> is not something we want to compromise on, and as a result Windows 7
> users must have KB2921916 installed. But Microsoft never supplied
> KB2921916 via Windows Update and it removed all Windows 7 hotfixes
> from its webpage last year. So in order to keep supporting this, we're
> forced to add clunky disgusting code like this:
> https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-windows/commit/?id=b63957dc830e39c94844d2f0d32ba29575991e44
> Keen readers will wince at all the layering violations there. 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.
> 
> Jason
> 

I fully understand the intention, to drop support for Win 7. Although I am still a happy user of it.
I would appreciate a solution, in which further developments of wireguard still remain backward compatible,
to keep the latest official wireguard for Win 7 still functionable with peers, running newer versions of wireguard.
At least for "quite some time".

Cheers,

Reiner