Re: Plan for inquiries about Emacs changes

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1988 bytes --]

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 13:07, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   >  We might want to try and enforce a standard format for responses
>   > to make collation of results easier.
>
> All else being equal, that might not be a bad thing.  But it would
> have the side effect of discouraging people from saying anything
> which doesn't fit that form, and that is the opposite of what I
> am trying to achieve.
>

Yes, we would need to be careful to avoid that. I probably should have said
encourage rather than enforce. In my mind, I was thinking along the lines
of the template displayed when you submit an emacs bug report. In fact, the
more I think about it, the more I like the idea of having an ELPA package
which could list open 'enqiries', allow the user to review the content and
then respond. The response process could add additional meta-data that
could be used to route the response to the appropriate place and possibly
other information which might be useful in further automation or
processing. The user would then be presented with a buffer containing
something like a tempo template, which they then fill out with their
response. While people could delete the whole template and just enter free
form text, most probably wouldn't and those that do probably felt they
needed to for a reason, which could be valid.

It might take a few iterations to get right, but in the end, we could
potentially have a useful feedback mechanism built into Emacs that would
help gather opinions etc from a group wider than those on emacs-devel.  I
would certainly be willing to assist, but I don't think my elisp skills are
strong enough to do the initial design and implementation. Could certainly
help with testing, debugging etc.

-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2566 bytes --]