Should We Start Dropping Windows XP Support?

[Fan Chun-wei <fanc999 yahoo com tw>]

Hi,

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

I understand that this has been brought up before, but I think probably 
it's time to gather views on whether we should start to drop XP support, as:

-There are some things that required specialized implementations for XP, 
for example, SRWLock in GLib and networking items in GIO, which may or 
may not work well.
 (for example, by using inet_pton() directly in ginetaddress.c for 
Windows Vista and later enabled many of the network-address.c tests to pass)
-We often needed to do GetProcAddress() to check the availability of 
system-level funtionalities, which would probably need a clean-up.
-As people may know, Microsoft ended support for XP this past April, and 
it is found that maintaining support for XP is becoming a bigger and 
bigger maintenance burden.
-There is likely the need to move forward to use newer system APIs and 
features, which were only available after XP (such as desktop/window 
composition)
-Other reasons that people might bring up for this.

I understand that it might be late in this dev cycle to drop XP support, 
but I do hope to do it (or at least take part in it) in the next cycle, 
so I am writing here to see how people think about this before going 
into this.

Any insight into this part would be really appreciated.

With blessings, thank you!