Re: Fedora 34 Change: Deprecate xemacs, xemacs-packages-base, xemacs-packages-extra, and neXtaw (Self-Contained Change proposal)

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Jerry James writes:
 > On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 5:37 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
 > <zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 > > Normally, I'd be in favour of "dragging out" the removal a bit, but
 > > in this case I think we don't need to, because of the relatively
 > > close replacement and the small number of users.

It's not a very close replacement.  Mostly in favor of GNU Emacs,
which has a large number of features (and regular maintenance) that
XEmacs does not.  I would expect that most Emacsen users have moved to
Emacs for that reason.  However, XEmacs has a number of unique
features, most important being the ability to load .so libraries in an
XEmacs-specific "module" format.  Any C-level support for external
libraries is likely to require a fair amount of work to port to Emacs,
as XEmacs and Emacs internal implementations are fairly divergent.

On the other hand, we never distributed any such things (we do
distribute a few accelerator modules but as far as I know all of those
implement features that GNU Emacs has natively), so most users will be
folks who implemented them themselves and have the necessary skills to
do ports to Emacs if they're still using them.  I don't recall hearing
of any that were widely distributed (eg, in a corporate environment).

 > I honestly have no idea how many users there are.  I have gotten bug
 > reports from time to time over the years, but it is possible that the
 > number of users has shrunk down to near zero, in which case I might be
 > worrying for nothing.

I don't know either, and apparently we lost the mailing list
membership lists when Aidan took them over, so there's no easy way for
us to ask.  Bugs do occasionally get reported upstream, there are a
few folks who did sign up again.  But I don't know if any of the known
users of XEmacs depend on Fedora.

FYI.  I'm sad to see XEmacs support removed from various
distributions, but the logic is clear.

Steve

-- 
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Tel: 029-853-5175                 Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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