Windows 2000 Support

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 01.04.2010 03:03, Ryan Clark wrote:
> I see that v1.5 does not support Win2k, but I heard a rumor that previous version did. Any chance of getting Win2k support back?

We currently explicitly reject installing on platforms older than
Windows XP in the installers built with the thg-winbuild scripts. [1]

The reason is mostly lack of testing and development resources
(manpower), and partly missing access to Windows licenses and Hardware
resources, combined with complete lack of interest in such outdated
platforms on our part (Steve, Yuki and myself).

With the downloads available at
http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/downloads/ we currently test
installing on *six* different Windows platforms on x86 and x64 machines.

It is rather unlikely that we will support Win2k on thg-winbuild anytime
soon, as there are lots of other more interesting items to work on.

If you want to experiment yourself, you can try modifying the msi
installers and remove the version check in the msi using for example the
Orca tool. It's an entry in the "LaunchCondition" table. The entry has a
condition expression of "VersionNT >= 501". But we do not recommend
doing that for production systems, because we haven't designed nor
tested the installers for Windows 2000.

Another option would be to build Mercurial/TortoiseHg yourself, or use
another installer built by someone else.

To my knowledge, there's nothing in the Mercurial sources itself that
would prevent Mercurial from running on Windows 2000.

[1] http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/thg-winbuild/wiki/Home