Re: Idea for determining what users use

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 01:47:49AM +0200, Kim F. Storm wrote:
> For the un-informed public (read journalists, m$-evangelists, etc),
> putting such a feature into emacs could be used to bad-mouth the
> GNU project for installing "SPY-ware" on the users' systems.

Yeah, I agree with this -- I've seen it happen before.  No matter how careful
you are to confirm with the user, there are a _lot_ of people out there who
will get their panties in a twist over it (you know, the same people who
encrypt their laundry-list).

So while I personally rather like such features (I like to know that I'm
having some influence!), I think it would probably cause more problems for
emacs than it would solve.

At best, I think you could get away with making it a feature that was off by
default, and had to be turned on explicitly -- this is obviously much worse
because doing so would skew the results highly, but it might be better than
doing polls, as the user would only have to enable it once, and wouldn't have
to bother with answering individual polls.

-Miles
-- 
Ich bin ein Virus. Mach' mit und kopiere mich in Deine .signature.