Re: Solaris dldump

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you for sharing your informed opinion.  I also can't see why we
> should consider the 20 year old Solaris 10 a blocker for removing the
> unexec build in Emacs 31.
>
> For example, even according to current Oracle communications, it will
> reach EOL in around two years.

"Even" implies that it will reach EOL sooner, but by all indications the
EOL date will be as stated, if it is not postponed any further, and
Oracle and related organizations will continue to support the operating
system at a reduced intensity indefinitely.  Why do you suppose this is,
if otherwise than because the operating system is abundantly used?

Fedora 40's remaining support period is shorter; should we not cease to
support it any longer, in view of the one or two crashes in the PGTK
configuration that can only be reproduced with the distribution
packages, and which continue to languish on the bug tracker?

> This means that by the time we release Emacs 31, users will already be
> busy moving to Solaris 11

This is nonsense.  It's impossible to upgrade installed Solaris 10
systems to Solaris 11, and being a robust system many users are content
to remain there till hell freezes over.  

> If they aren't, they're fine on Emacs 30, or they can help us fix
> pdumper.

No one is ever "fine on" an outdated text editor.  You agree that this
principle applies to operating systems, but when Emacs is in question,
the about-face comes very quickly.

It's a waste of my time (and my organization's) that would be totally
needless if you were not so trigger-happy with old and proven features.
It's a-ok to retain pure space to avoid burdening someone with very
hypothetical additional labor, but it's not possible to take a far less
radical measure to conserve my time.  In any event, I promised to devote
some of it to this issue after Emacs 30 is released.

> If there is interest in that very old proprietary system, and there is
> some problem with using pdumper there, then users should report bugs and
> volunteers should step up to fix them.

According to Microsoft, Windows XP reached EOL in 2014, and yet its
users are none the less inclined to the latest releases of Emacs (nor
has it been prevented from retaining 0.38% of Windows's aggregate market
share, in excess of Windows 8's 0.24):

  https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide.