> The patch however sneakily removes the chance ...
If they haven't tested on other processors, should they leave code in because it has a "chance" to work on something else? I think both sides of this question could be legitimately argued so I wouldn't jump to calling it "evil".
Gemstone provides a database. There are very large Smalltalk based applications that run using Gemstone as the backing database[1] . These applications are, for the most part, very large in-house applications that don't have much external visibility.
If they haven't tested on other processors, should they leave code in because it has a "chance" to work on something else? I think both sides of this question could be legitimately argued so I wouldn't jump to calling it "evil".