Re: Motif support

[Po Lu]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> It won't hurt to keep that code, especially since nobody has managed
> to break in close to a year since it was disabled, even with large
> features such as XInput2 and the xwidgets update.

I find most of the discussion alarming on other fronts as well.  The
PGTK branch is hardly ready to become the default, much less replace the
existing X and GTK 3 build.  People are also talking about removing
support for Xft and lwlib!

There are quite a few features that the PGTK build cannot, by design,
support.  Aside from the ones I listed earlier, there's also:

  - The inability to support session management.  (To accomplish that
    with only GTK, you have to use GtkApplication, whose architecture is
    simply incompatible with Emacs.)
  - The inability to understand X resources.
  - The inability to support popular existing packages, such as EXWM.
  - The inability to have `yank-media' work.  (Though this can probably
    be fixed.)

There are also a few other limitations shared by both the cairo and PGTK
builds:

  - The inability to function correctly without the X Render Extension.
  - The inability to work at all with a pseudo color visual, or a
    private colormap, because Cairo was not designed to work this way.

The last problem means Xft is the only way to get FreeType fonts on a
server using a pseudo color visual.  This feature is often used to get
better performance on X running over the network, so removing it would
be a very bad idea.  It's okay to trade a few crashes when loading color
fonts for this functionality, as long as it isn't the default build
configuration.

>From personal experience, there are a few more, but I can't list them
off-hand right now.

In short: please don't rush to remove either the existing GTK build, Xft
support, or the lwlib build, or the non-Cairo X build.  They are still
useful, and more importantly, there is no reason at all to rush things.