Re: Frequently Enabled Packages - Emacs-24.4 survey (Please participate)

["William G. Gardella" <wgg2@member.fsf.org>]

Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> writes:

> You think you are prosecuting me.  You also sit in the judge's chair.  I
> am NOT on the defence benches.
>
> If you could set aside the Hon. Judge's robes and alight the chair you
>  you are sitting in, we can have some meaningful discussion.

Ok.  I'll put it more simply.  This survey as presently organized is
stupid drudgery, and the purpose of Emacs (like any good hack) is to
eliminate such.  Resorting to drudgery when automation is available is
doubly stupid.

As I said, if the project wants accurate data about what minor modes are
used, I think the way to do this is with M-x report-emacs-bug, which has
"Minor modes in effect:" as a subset of its data--as opposed to the
drudgery of making users manually enter data on the [unofficial] wiki.

The bad policy-making that could result from an inaccurate survey is
that some modes will be overcounted and some will be undercounted.  That
won't lead to "apocalypse," just to an editor/environment that's worse
than it potentially could be, with less sane defaults.  Bad data is
better than no data, admittedly, but this data is really bad.