[Development] Windows 7 support future removal

[André Pönitz]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 11:03:43PM -0700, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Since we're talking about macOS 10.11 and I came across the Windows support 
> lifetime pages, I'm posting this for future reference.
> 
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet
> 
> Windows 7 ends its Extended Support lifecycle on January 14, 2020, roughly a 
> year and a half from now. If we keep our current release cycle, the current 
> release at that time will be 5.14. Or, put differently, Windows 7 will be out 
> of support when 5.15 launches.
> 
> We may want to drop support for it in one of those two releases. We should 
> announce we're doing so one year before the fact. So if we'd like to drop in 
> 5.14, we should include the announcement in the 5.12 changelog.

What exactly does Qt gain by dropping Windows 7 compatibility?

"Being out of support by Microsoft" seems to be for quite a few people
a rather unimportant line of reasoning in comparison to having to submit
to Windows 10-style forced system upgrades and snooping on user activities.

Andre'