Re: gettext and C usage

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Bruno Haible wrote:

> Hans-Bernhard Broeker writes:
> > Since when would 'reasonability' of a choice of target platform have
> > been a valid argument for GNU?
> 
> Since ever. See the GNU standards, section "Portability between
> System Types".

With all due respect to principles, I think this is not the right case to 
apply them.  The price for having an ifdef that evaluates to non-zero on 
99.9% of platforms is negligible, and IMHO is certainly not worth the 
kind of user aggravation if she happens to need Texinfo (or any other 
package) on one of those 0.1%.

FWIW, the same person who maintains the GNU Standards consistently tells 
Emacs maintainers to keep compatibility to systems that are even older 
than the one cited by Ian.  So my reading of the GNU Standards language 
is that a maintainer could consider dropping support for ``unreasonable'' 
platforms if its support costs him/her a considerable effort.  But when 
there's no effort, dropping support for a platform is not recommended.