[vtkusers] Can we drop Visual Studio 6 support?

[David Thompson]

> What sort of maintenance issues are you having?
This type:
http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/Common/vtkUnicodeString.cxx?view=log
There are *many* more examples (perhaps not all as humorously narrated),
but the general problem is that the dashboard machines are the only way
for many developers to test whether something will work with MSVC6. It
can be quite irritating to check in something that should fix a compile
problem and have to wait 1-2 hours before seeing the result.

> I think the real issue is what compilers do the VTK installed base
> use? You may have customers that are using 3rd party drivers/libraries
> that are VS6. Actually, there is no way to know who the customers are.
It would be nice to assume that customers who continue to develop with
VTK read at least the digest, but I agree that some may note and it
could be some time before we hear from them. I still think it is a good
idea to drop VC6 not because it's irritating to debug build problems but
because it can lead to obfuscated code as people rewrite bits here and
there to accommodate old syntax and broken STL implementations.

	David

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > We are thinking of dropping support for Visual Studio 6. It is causing
> > annoying maintenance issues since no one in the developer team uses it
> > and since VS 6 supports only a subset of modern C++ features. Are
> > there any objects? If yes, I would like to know why.
> >
> > Best,
> > -berk
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