document restrictions for 2.4 on windows

[Gert Döring]

2.4 will no longer work on XP (unless someone puts large amounts of efforts into making GetBestRoute2() totally dynamically-discovered and "do nothing on XP").

The installer should check for Vista or higher, and refuse cooperation (point to 2.3) on XP - and some bits of the documentation also seem to say "xp or higher".

I'm setting milestone to "alpha 2.4" because it wouldn't be good to annoy early testers right away by installing openvpn just fine, and then it will not work.

(OTOH there's a benefit: no need to build installers with the old tap driver any longer :) )

thanks :)

[Samuli Seppänen]

This is related to ticket #632.

[Samuli Seppänen]

OpenVPN installers starting with OpenVPN 2.4_rc1 will refuse co-operation on Windows XP and will provide static download links for Windows XP-compatible installers.

What remains is to remove mentions of "Windows XP or higher" from the documentation.

[Samuli Seppänen]

In Git "master" branch there is scarcely any mention of Windows XP:

$ cd openvpn
$ grep -n -A 1 -B 1 -riE "(win|windows )xp" INSTALL PORTS README* doc
INSTALL-61-  (6) NetBSD 5.0+
INSTALL:62:  (7) Windows (WinXP and higher)
INSTALL-63-
--
INSTALL-300-  include this driver, so installing it separately is not usually required.
INSTALL:301:  Windows XP/2003 must use the NDIS 5 (tap-windows) driver, whereas on more
INSTALL-302-  recent Windows versions it is recommended to use the NDIS 6 driver
--
doc/openvpn.8-2839-.B brctl
doc/openvpn.8:2840:tool, and with Windows XP it is done in the Network
doc/openvpn.8-2841-Connections Panel by selecting the ethernet and
--
doc/openvpn.8-5619-command.  This method appears to work correctly on
doc/openvpn.8:5620:Windows XP but not Windows 2000.
doc/openvpn.8-5621-
--
doc/openvpn.8-5786-This option is considered unknown on non-Windows platforms
doc/openvpn.8:5787:and unsupported on Windows XP, resulting in fatal error.
doc/openvpn.8-5788-You may want to use
--
doc/openvpn.8-5791-.B \-\-ignore\-unknown\-option
doc/openvpn.8:5792:(not suitable for Windows XP) to ignore said error.
doc/openvpn.8-5793-Note that pushing unknown options from server does not trigger

In theory there could be places where "windows" and "xp" are on different line and not caught by above grep, but in practice there are none.

What about just updating INSTALL with information that OpenVPN 2.3 is the last version to support Windows XP?

[Samuli Seppänen]

Fixed by ​https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/commit/1c587a11122206186098c2014d407d0eb469656e