Ship Mints <shipmints@gmail.com> writes:

> Eli asked that the hurdle to be cleared was support of the same feature
> on a free platform.  If that hurdle is based on platform popularity, what
> are the precise metrics we should use to gauge such?  I'm aware of
> GNUstep being actively used in military, aerospace, and industrial
> products.  Is Haiku?  Or any other esoteric platforms that Emacs
> supports?

The criteria is whether it tends to afford users of Emacs on proprietary
systems an advantage over those of free systems.  There's no reason to
insist that everything should be reduced to figures--Emacs on GNUstep is
not a viable substitute for any other configuration, and hence everyone
and his dog can see that features it might support are not material,
when the only alternative is Mac OS.

Haiku is free software and, above all, it is not being invoked to
rationalize the introduction of features on a proprietary OS.  The
question at issue is a world removed from whether to support an OS at
all.  So I fail to perceive its relevance.