Re: Cleaning out old X11 toolkits?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: chad <yandros@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:18:27 -0800
> Cc: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>, Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>, 
> Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org>, 
>       emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Stefan Monnier 
> <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, 
>       Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> In more pragmatic terms, I would guess that it's entirely possible to excise 
> motif/lesstif, athena, and Xaw3d
> from main without anyone noticing. Whether this is worth the effort in a 
> world leaning ever so slowly towards
> Cairo and pgtk is a little hard to tell, but a quick grep through src 
> suggests that it would at least clear up a
> bunch of #ifdef spaghetti.
> 
> Would the maintainers be interested in a branch that tried this? Would it be 
> better to wait for pgtk to settle
> first? Is there a big use-case for those toolkits of which I'm unaware?

I'm not sure I understand how a branch could help.  A branch is
generally used by significantly fewer people than the master branch.
A branch that doesn't bring any new user-visible features, and just
cleans up code, is unlikely to provide motivation for anyone to try
it.  So I'm afraid such a branch will just sit there unused, and will
not bring us any closer to a decision.

I think if we want to move towards removing those toolkits, we should
try a different approach.  Two ideas:

  . analyze the bug report in debbugs DB, and see how many builds are
    with any of these toolkits
  . look at GNU/Linux distros and see if they still provide builds
    with any of these toolkits, and what was the last version of Emacs
    when they did

We should also somehow analyze the usage of these toolkits on other
Posix platforms, although I'm not sure I know how -- do they offer
distros similar to GNU/Linux? if so, we could include them in the 2nd
item above.

Once we have an idea about the usage and popularity of each of these
toolkits, we could decide what changes are reasonable, and make them
on master.