Re: Windows emacs-25.1 i686 vs x86_64?

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> > Also, please don't remove information about Windows 9X, as the 32-bit
>> > MS-Windows build of Emacs still supports that.
>> 
>> I would argue against this. I removed the material on Windows 9x since
>> it has long since reached EOL -- 10 years, or 25% of Emacs' existance.
>
> That is true, but we still try supporting those old systems, as they
> are widespread in the 3rd world.  We have code whose only purpose is
> to continue that support.  We don' take MS EOL decisions as important.

EOL decisions are important. Of course, this does not mean that you have
to take them as gospel, but to ignore them is not a good course, I
think.

Still I see others have taken up this issue in the thread, so I will not
revisit the issue of whether 95/98 are supported further, and so only
comment on it's position in the documentation.

>> While providing this information somewhere might be useful, having it in
>> this readme mostly serves to make the readme and to some extent Emacs
>> appear unmaintained.
>
> I don't see why a document that mentions the latest version of Emacs
> could appear unmaintained.  If you'd like we could mention the date of
> last update in the file.


I think that this is not the issue -- in general, if I read a document
that has lots of advice on what to do with long obsolete operating
systems, I would just assume that it has not been maintained.


>> In addition, it also makes the documentation longer which adds to
>> the impression that Emacs is hard to use.
>
> One short paragraph is not a significant addition, IMO.


The file is already very long for a readme. My experience of watching
new Emacs users is that there experience is very much "do I have to read
all of this to edit a file".

Reducing things like this readme to an absolute minimum seems a useful
aim. How to support a very, very old operating system seems a poor thing
to include. To steal a quote "It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of
words."

Incidentally, on this topic, is this paragraph (adding in 2001) still at
all relevant?

  Virus scanners

  Some virus scanners interfere with Emacs' use of subprocesses.  If you
  are unable to use subprocesses and you use Dr. Solomon's WinGuard or
  McAfee's Vshield, turn off "Scan all files" (WinGuard) or "boot sector
  scanning" (McAfee exclusion properties).


>> I'd be happy to look for somewhere else to put this information, if you
>> think it need to be retained.
>
> There's no other good place.  This is the file where users should look
> for preliminaries for Emacs installation.


README.W32.obsolete?

Phil