Re: desupporting X10 and old X11 releases

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Before we delete oldXMenu as an option, I want to ask users if anyone
> still wants it.  Supporting it is not costing much effort, and it
> is not a matter of a platform that may have disappeared.

Here are some data from Gentoo (for both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD).
I have extracted the configuration information ("USE flags") from
GNU Emacs related bugs that were reported to us in 2006 and 2007.
(I didn't bother to correct for users reporting more than one bug,
so active users might have more than one "vote" in the table below.
It's not dominated by a small number of users though.)

The result is quite surprising (at least to me):

   Toolkit                  Gentoo USE flags      number
   -----------------------------------------------------
   gtk                      X gtk                     80
   athena / lucid           X -gtk Xaw3d               2
   motif / lesstif          X -gtk -Xaw3d motif        2
   no toolkit / oldXMenu    X -gtk -Xaw3d -motif      18
   no X                     -X                        15
   -----------------------------------------------------

The reason for the low numbers for "athena/lucid" and "motif/lesstif"
may be that the Gentoo ebuild always prefers "gtk" if the user
specifies more than one toolkit at the same time. (The raw numbers for
the USE flags are 21 times "X Xaw3d" and 40 times "X motif".)

However, the conclusion is that there seems to be a substantial number
of Emacs installations using either no X toolkit, or no X at all.

Ulrich