Emacs is already huge and I think Motif is pretty much dead at this point (I think I haven't seen any Motif-based apps in 10+ years), which makes Motif support in Emacs dead weight IMO. A case can be made for keeping everything indefinitely, but I think the practical approach is to focus on what matters (is used) the most and shed the rest for the sake of simplicity and easier long-term maintenance.
Having less code is almost always better, so I don't agree with the assessment that keeping some legacy code around won't hurt. Less is more.
> Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2021 15:14:30 +0800
>
>
> > I don't think we want to reinstate Motif support.
>
> The code still works perfectly: reinstating that line allowed me to
> configure and build a functioning Motif Emacs, even with new features
> such as XInput2.
We didn't remove Motif because it was broken, we removed it because
the consensus was it was relatively unused and unsupported by distros.
> 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 don't like to go back on our decisions except if they turn out to be
grave mistakes. So, unless there are very good reasons to reinstate
Motif support, I'd like to leave it unsupported.
Let's see what others think about this.