SL Baur <steve(a)xemacs.org> writes:
> A year or so from now, if things keep going the way they have been,
> nearly all of our users will be on either Linux or some flavor of
> Microsoft Windows. Linux has been the most popular Unix to run XEmacs
> on[1] since 19.14.
> [1] With regards to counts of downloads of binary kits from the FTP site.
Do you really think that this in any way reflects number of users? I
would say that it has almost no connection to number of users per
platform.
The Linux community has moved very strongly into a Windows-like use
model of software installation. Each user tends to download a binary
package for their own machine (RPM, debian pkg, XEmacs binary kit,
etc) and run it locally.
Users of many other Unices tend to follow the more traditional (within
UNIX) model. One tarball of source is downloaded and built just how
it ought to be used in that site's environment, then the resulting
binaries are used by a great deal of people.
Measuring the number of binary kits downloaded is useless as a measure
of the distrubution of XEmacs users by platform.
> This is not to say that I'm in favor of dropping portable Unix
> support. I'm not. It's just not as important as it used to be.
I certainly hope that it continues to be very important.
I find messages such as this one to be very strange and disheartening.
--
Justin Sheehy
In a cloud bones of steel.
