Re: [PATCH] system-type cygwin with window-system w32

[Daniel Colascione <dan.colascione@gmail.com>]

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On 7/18/2011 3:45 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> Daniel Colascione <dan.colascione@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On 7/18/2011 3:08 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>>>     I don't recall that discussion.  Can we reopen it?  According to [1],
>>>     Windows 98 has a market share of 0.03%.
>>>
>>> That must be hundreds of thousands of people.
>>
>> ~300,000 if we assume 1 billion people worldwide.  That's still
>> miniscule in proportion --- and of those 300,000, how many are savvy
>> enough to be Emacs users?
>>
>> If there _are_ any remaining Windows 9X Emacs users, dropping 9X
>> support will be doing them a favor: using an OS that doesn't receive
>> security updates is terribly dangerous.
> 
> Why?  Not every computer is used for browsing the internet.

I'd argue that the vast majority of "computers" that can run Emacs are,
in fact, network-connected.  Most of what Emacs is good for involves the
network at one point or another.

Sure, there might be a few special-purpose known-good "appliance"
computers, but if one of these machines is still running Windows 9X, it
was probably configured years and years ago and not touched since,
except perhaps for the occasional goat sacrifice made to keep it
running.  Installing a new version of Emacs on these machines would be a
high-risk operation and wouldn't happen, and we're not talking about
retroactively removing support in older Emacs versions.


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