Re: Windows emacs-25.1 i686 vs x86_64?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2016 01:10:26 -0700
> 
>     That is true, but we still try supporting those old systems, as they
>     are widespread in the 3rd world.
> 
> That may have been true a decade ago, but Windows 9x is no longer a practical porting target even in the third world. For what it's worth, statcounter.com lists WinME's popularity as dropping from 0.37% of China's desktop market in March 2014 to 0.01% in August of this year, and they no longer even bother measuring its popularity in Africa.

Windows/ME was never popular, even when it was released, as it's a
botched OS.  A more interesting statistics is the sum total of all 9X
systems.

Also, even 0.01% in China could be quite a lot of machines.

In any case, the non-removal of support for Windows 9X was an explicit
request from Richard, an opinion which AFAIU he still held 5 years
ago:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-07/msg00827.html
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-07/msg00839.html

> Besides, at this point it borders on technical malpractice to suggest to users that it's OK to use Windows 9x to run Emacs.

How can this be a malpractice, technical or otherwise?  It _is_ okay
to do that for users that don't have access to newer systems.  We are
talking about the same binary, available from the GNU FTP site, that
other users run on the latest Windows systems.  If it's okay on any
other Windows system, it's okay on Windows 9X.