Re: Solaris dldump

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Fedora 40's remaining support period is shorter; should we not cease to
> support it any longer,

We seem to be miscommunicating.  I'm not suggesting explicitly
desupporting Solaris 10.

Spending considerable time on keeping the unexec build alive has stopped
making sense for the project as a whole.  The good news is that there is
nothing to suggest that the portable dumper should not be fixable on the
systems where it's reportedly not yet up to scratch.

I'm saying 1) that the reported problems with the portable dumper on
some proprietary systems (MS-DOS, Windows 98, Solaris 10) should be
fixed, 2) that I do not consider this blocking us from dropping the
unexec build at the present time, and 3) I urged volunteers to step
forward to improve and/or fix pdumper on these systems.

I recommend reading the "Information for Maintainers of GNU Software"
manual to get a better view of some of the principles that are guiding
my thinking:

    https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Platforms

Note in particular this part:

    "Supporting other platforms is optional -- we do it when that seems
    like a good idea, but we don’t consider it obligatory.  If the users
    don’t take care of a certain platform, you may have to desupport it
    unless and until users come forward to help.  Conversely, if a user
    offers changes to support an additional platform, you will probably
    want to install them, but you don’t have to.  If you feel the
    changes are complex and ugly, if you think that they will increase
    the burden of future maintenance, you can and should reject them.
    This includes both free or mainly-free platforms such as OpenBSD,
    FreeBSD, and NetBSD, and nonfree platforms such as Windows."

These are the basics, applicable to the GNU project as a whole.  There
are special considerations for Emacs, of course, some of which have been
indicated in this thread.  For example, we are probably "best-in-class"
among GNU projects when it comes to supporting various platforms, even
very old/obsolete ones, and at the cost of valuable time and resources.

So don't let anyone believe that we rush to leave (even fringe) groups
of users behind for no good reason.  That's just not the case.  But we
do have certain things that we prioritize ahead of others.  That
sometimes means asking for volunteer help to do things that are merely
secondary, if that helps us advance our primary goals.

Right now, it's very clear that the unexec build has reached the end of
the road.  Thus, we must ask volunteers to help us improve pdumper on
systems that, with respect to existing users, are not currently primary
considerations.

I hope that helps make things more clear.

> In any event, I promised to devote some of it to this issue after
> Emacs 30 is released.

That is good and welcome.  Thanks in advance for your efforts.