Re: Idea for determining what users use

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    knowing how ego-driven programmers are, i fear this would lead to lots
    of spam as every little (sub-)feature is instrumented so.

I think you must have misunderstood the proposal.  We will insert
these calls when and where we want them.  I can't see why we would
have any problems as a result.

Mail sent to emacs-features-used@gnu.org will just be dumped into a
file.  We will search the file when we want to search it.

    IMHO, it is better not to tie such a poll to any specific release, since
    a release is just a snapshot of various disparate albeit concurrent
    activities.

It is impossible to avoid this.  Whatever we put into the code,
to indicate which functions etc. we are interested in,
that thing will appear in certain Emacs releases and not others.


Someone suggested "batching" these responses.  That can't be done
because you never know that the same user will encounter another one
of these calls.  The one he has encountered today may be the last one.

It is also unnecessary, because these calls will be few and not
frequent.  We will put them in features for which we don't know of any
users.  Most users will not encounter any of them.  Of those who
encounter one, most will never encounter another.

We know about surveys.  This is not a survey.