Re: Cleaning out old X11 toolkits?

[Colin Baxter]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

    >> From: chad <yandros@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:18:27
    >> -0800 Cc: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>, Yuan Fu
    >> <casouri@gmail.com>, Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org>, emacs-devel
    >> <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>,
    >> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
    >> 
    >> In more pragmatic terms, I would guess that it's entirely
    >> possible to excise motif/lesstif, athena, and Xaw3d from main
    >> without anyone noticing. Whether this is worth the effort in a
    >> world leaning ever so slowly towards Cairo and pgtk is a little
    >> hard to tell, but a quick grep through src suggests that it would
    >> at least clear up a bunch of #ifdef spaghetti.
    >> 
    >> Would the maintainers be interested in a branch that tried this?
    >> Would it be better to wait for pgtk to settle first? Is there a
    >> big use-case for those toolkits of which I'm unaware?

    > I'm not sure I understand how a branch could help.  A branch is
    > generally used by significantly fewer people than the master
    > branch.  A branch that doesn't bring any new user-visible
    > features, and just cleans up code, is unlikely to provide
    > motivation for anyone to try it.  So I'm afraid such a branch will
    > just sit there unused, and will not bring us any closer to a
    > decision.

    > I think if we want to move towards removing those toolkits, we
    > should try a different approach.  Two ideas:

    >   . analyze the bug report in debbugs DB, and see how many builds
    > are with any of these toolkits . look at GNU/Linux distros and see
    > if they still provide builds with any of these toolkits, and what
    > was the last version of Emacs when they did

    > We should also somehow analyze the usage of these toolkits on
    > other Posix platforms, although I'm not sure I know how -- do they
    > offer distros similar to GNU/Linux? if so, we could include them
    > in the 2nd item above.

    > Once we have an idea about the usage and popularity of each of
    > these toolkits, we could decide what changes are reasonable, and
    > make them on master.

I would like to put in a plea for the retention of lucid. I build both
lucid and GTK versions of emacs. The former consistently loads about a
third faster and for text applications, e.g. auctex, I prefer it. I
write this knowing that my preferences can be dismissed as personal and
anecdotal.
 
Best wishes,