Re: Windows 9X without KernelEx

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 23:37:58 +0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > We never really supported Windows 95, only Windows 98.  So I don't
> > think it makes sense to introduce all this complexity now, just to add
> > Windows 95 to the soup.
> >
> > Or are you saying that there are problems on Windows 98 as well?
> 
> Probably, yes.  The Windows 95 portions of this change are only a
> fractoon of the whole, in all likelihood, but I cannot swear to either
> possibility as KernelEx dlls export plenty of functions called from
> w32*.c, and my searching revealed no symbol list for Windows 98 online,
> leaving me with no choice but to err on the side of caution.

I do have such lists, but no one said they are accurate, and I don't
have a system to try that.

If you are saying that Emacs doesn't work on Windows 98, then we need
to handle this one issue at a time.

First, does Emacs refuse to start on Windows 98, because some function
we call directly is unavailable there, even when UNICOWS.DLL is
installed?  If Emacs refuses to start due to some functions called
directly, please submit a bug with the names of those functions, and
this is something we _must_ solve (but can do that after the release
branch is created).

If Emacs does start, it means Windows 98 provides at least stubs for
those functions.  Then we need to consider each of the functions you
mentioned in the patch separately.  Some of them I'd simply ignore:
for example, it makes no sense to me to fix the Uniscribe support if
its broken, since we prefer HarfBuzz anyway.  Similarly for w32notify:
all we need is to make file-notifications unavailable on Windows 98.

Therefore, please submit a separate bug for each of the functions you
think are missing or don't work, and let's consider them each as a
separate issue.  Part of the consideration is the potential breakage
in the Windows port that could be caused on modern Windows systems --
if the risk is too high, I'd prefer to delay the solution to Emacs 31.
It would be good if each such bug report included results of actual
attempt to use those functions on Windows 98, if you can do that,
because then we'd have detailed information about the possible
breakage, and will be able to weigh our options based on solid facts.

Thanks.