I agree we should not go "extra mile" to add feature for Windows XP, a 12 year old software and soon to be "put down" a couple months forward.

But in this case, Antoine goes "extra mile" to prevent symbolic link support in Windows XP. And it's not just him that has this kind of reasoning. Django developers put this code which is similar with pathlib.

django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py

        if self.symlink:
            if sys.platform == 'win32':
                raise CommandError("Symlinking is not supported by this "
                                   "platform (%s)." % sys.platform)
            if not self.local:
                raise CommandError("Can't symlink to a remote destination.")

I opened this ticket because I am curious why developers go "extra mile" to prevent symbolic link support in certain platform. Why not just let os.symlink does the job and propagate the error from there? What is the virtue of not letting os.symlink decides who gets the symbolic link support? Surely in Windows XP (without 3rd party driver) os.symlink will throws exception and how that differs from throwing exception in pathlib library?

But anyway feel free to close this ticket. I think I'll just "copy" Antoine's checking in solving this Django's bug:
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21482