Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Ken Manheimer <ken.manheimer@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 5:27 AM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> [...]
>   > The nagging approach can just as likely alienate users.
>
> A message at most once a week, that is on the screen for a short time,
> is hardly "nagging".


That's a misleading way to think about it. If every major facility on a
machine was nonchalant about some random once-per-week notification, you
could potentially have several to hundreds per day. (I sometimes feel like
it's towards the more extreme end on the rare occasions that I fire up
Windows machines.) Righteous as the specific purpose might or might not be,
it will be another interruption in the escalating battle for users stray
attention, in which users are the losers.

A properly targeted notification is delivered when someone is initiating
actions specifically for the purpose that the notification addresses. I'm
not sure where that would be in this case, but hearing "once per week"
suggests to me that it's randomly targeted, as part of an activity that
sometimes and sometimes doesn't include the specific activity.

Ken

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