Re: future of emacs20

["Thomas F. Burdick" <tfb@OCF.Berkeley.EDU>]

Jim McCloskey writes:
 > 
 > |> I'm not a great fan of orphaning complicated packages.  Are there users
 > |> that need emacs20 because emacs21 is broken for some things? 
 > 
 > So it's not just an issue of what's broken, I think. It's also a
 > matter of whether the number of users in the situation I just
 > described justifies the effort that would be required to maintain
 > emacs20 as a package.

While emacs21 is unusable on things like Sun Ultra-1's and Pentiums,
it's also unusable in some shared and networked environments, even
with top-of-the-line hardware.  Emacs21 is a resource hog compared to
20.  Not so much in terms of memory, but it seems to use a lot more
processor time, and is so bandwidth-hogging, it can be unusable over
even a fairly fast network.

I think there are two things that need to change with emacs21 before
support for emacs20 is dropped: it should be usable by multiple users
on out-of-date, but reasonable systems; and it should be usable over a
network.  The first one will change with time; the second one will
require the Emacs maintainers to figure out *why* emacs21 is so chatty
on the X11 connection.  Unfortunately, I've seen no desire to do this.

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