Re: Windows emacs-25.1 i686 vs x86_64?

[Phillip Lord]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > In GNU projects, we typically stop worrying about an underlying
>   > platform when its original supplier stops supporting it. For
>   > example, Emacs no longer worries about IRIX because SGI stopped
>   > supporting IRIX in 2013.
>
> In the GNU Project, the question that matters, for a system version of
> no particular importance to us (such as any version of Windows), is
> whether users care about that version enough to maintain support for
> it.  If they do that, we may as well not delete their code
> unless it is getting in the way rather badly.


The original issue that came up here is not about code but about
documentation. My desire is to have the readme a) as short as possible
and b) not make Emacs appear unmaintained.


> If we have no direct evidence about whether users care about a certain
> version, by default we can suppose that they won't care about a
> version that is no longer being maintained.  But that's not the
> criterion, just a default way to guess.
>
> Given that Windows is so widely used, and that so many users stick to
> old versions of it, it is plausible to me that millions of people
> still use Windows 98.  Maybe tens or hundreds of millions.
>
> That number may still be growing.  ISTR that even a few years ago
> people were still installing unauthorized copies of Windows 98 on PCs,
> because Microsoft made it harder to install subsequent Windows
> versions.  It would not surprise me if Windows 98 was installed on
> millions of new PCs this year.


All this may be true, but it does not help. We have no direct evidence
about whether users care about a certain version. Unless we have a way
of gaining that evidence, we are left with supposition.

What we do know is that we get very few bug reports for Windows 98/95.
The only thing that I could think of further to get more information
would be to check the download logs; does ftp.gnu.org store user agent
strings or equivalent. This would at least give us some evidence about
Windows 9x -- also Windows XP.

Incidentally, even if Emacs is supported on these platforms, I have
not tested the binary downloads on any of them, nor do I have the
capability to do so.

Phil