Re: .info files

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/04/2012 01:49 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> In developing and maintaining code, we meet such problems and solve
> them every day.  The fact that this one was caused by MS-DOS is just a
> coincidence.

Yes, it was a coincidence that I happened to run into an MS-DOS-related
build problem a few minutes before seeing your email.  But it is not a
coincidence that MS-DOS support comes at a cost.

Supporting MS-DOS is like supporting K&R C compilers, in that
it's a minor hassle during development that benefits a small number
of users, and we have to estimate whether the benefits are worth the cost.
With K&R C we decided the benefits are not worth the cost, and perhaps
a similar decision is appropriate for MS-DOS.

It's not just MS-DOS.  I agree with Glenn that it would
also be useful to poll about obsolete Unix variants whose support
clutter Emacs's code.  This is a normal part of our release process.

The Emacs 23.1 release announcement in 2009, for example, said that
we plan to remove support for old GNU/Linux systems based on libc
version 5, which last shipped around 1998 -- i.e., GNU systems that
were more than a decade old.  The last version of MS-DOS, if memory
serves, was the one that came with Windows ME in 2000, which suggests
that it's an appropriate time to consider decommissioning its support
as well.