Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Emacs never worked on that platform

Sure it did. Emacs worked until FreeBSD 11, when the arm64 port modernized its 
memory-management implementation. If Glibc does something similar, it would be a 
mistake to say "that's OK, Emacs never worked on that platform", as this might 
give non-experts the misimpression that Emacs never worked on GNU/Linux.

> they removed a certain library function, which happens to be called by unexec.

This was no accident. They removed it because it was producing bogus values, and 
it didn't reflect how FreeBSD actually allocates memory. Whether the function 
worked for Emacs at all was apparently a matter of luck.

I would rather not tell FreeBSD/arm64 users that they can't run Emacs any more 
because we can't be bothered to install a patch that's been contributed, not 
even a patch that's compiled by default only on FreeBSD/arm64.

I sympathize with Daniel about the politics of this. This is not the sort of 
change that we'd ordinarily create a new branch for, and the way this is being 
handled will likely discourage further contributions.