Re: Increase minimum required GTK versions?

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 4/8/19 9:15 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> I also have no problem with
> dropping RHEL6 support in Emacs 27 if it makes maintenance significantly
> easier.)

That would be a bridge too far. Several of the servers in my school are
still running RHEL 6, and people build and install recently-released
software like Emacs on them.

Although I don't know of any servers at UCLA still running RHEL 5, my
department's main server is still running Solaris 10 (released 2005,
"Extended Support" through 2021) and current Emacs is still relevant on
that platform, at least to me. I don't doubt there are still people
running RHEL 5 (released 2005, "Extended Life Cycle support" through
2020) and I suspect it's possible that some of them might like to run
current Emacs.

Emacs and most other GNU packages still run on Solaris 10, and it would
feel odd for a GNU package like Emacs to support a mostly-proprietary
system like Solaris for longer than it supports a mostly-free system
like Red Hat. That being said, Emacs still supports Windows 95
(originally released 1995, "extended support" through 2001) so there is
a precedent for Emacs supporting an old proprietary platform better than
an old mostly-free platform.

How much easier is it to drop support for RHEL 5 now, as opposed to
doing it next year when Red Hat stops supporting it?