From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Jean Louis Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2020 21:25:50 +0300 Message-ID: <20201011182550.GN2923@protected.rcdrun.com> References: <30addebe-999b-c1cc-a8d8-27aba3fac566@gmx.com> <4a1188f8-9864-54c0-ae6f-5f32102d9757@gmx.com> <874kn2sdss.fsf@iki.fi> <20201011103235.GA28425@protected.rcdrun.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:116.202.254.214"; logging-data="13138"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" User-Agent: Mutt/1.14.0 (2020-05-02) Cc: Adrien Brochard , rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Drew Adams Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sun Oct 11 20:30:34 2020 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1kRg78-0003KO-Lc for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 20:30:34 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:57702 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRg77-00053L-Gc for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 14:30:33 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:36626) by lists.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRg3l-0003C6-7l for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 14:27:05 -0400 Original-Received: from [95.85.24.50] (port=43763 helo=static.rcdrun.com) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRg3i-0007kP-MX; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 14:27:04 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost ([::ffff:197.157.0.35]) (AUTH: PLAIN admin, TLS: TLS1.2,256bits,ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384) by static.rcdrun.com with ESMTPSA id 00000000002A0B3D.000000005F834E73.000058AA; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 18:26:58 +0000 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-Host-Lookup-Failed: Reverse DNS lookup failed for 95.85.24.50 (failed) Received-SPF: pass client-ip=95.85.24.50; envelope-from=bugs@gnu.support; helo=static.rcdrun.com X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: First seen = 2020/10/11 13:16:16 X-ACL-Warn: Detected OS = Linux 3.11 and newer [fuzzy] X-Spam_score_int: 4 X-Spam_score: 0.4 X-Spam_bar: / X-Spam_report: (0.4 / 5.0 requ) BAYES_00=-1.9, RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB=1.5, RDNS_NONE=0.793, SPF_HELO_PASS=-0.001, SPF_PASS=-0.001 autolearn=no autolearn_force=no X-Spam_action: no action X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:257388 Archived-At: * Drew Adams [2020-10-11 18:15]: > Actually, we already have this functionality, which is > submitting free-form feedback of any kind. We call it > an enhancement request, and we tell users to use > `M-x report-emacs-bug' for it. This is not as well > known as it should be, IMO. Only that "report Emacs bug" does not sound as free form feedback of any kind. I know it is, but it does not sound as enhancement request. It takes time for person to realize that. > It would be good for the `Help' menu to have an item > that explicitly calls this `Suggest Improvements' or > similar. It would be bound to `report-emacs-bug'. Such menu in Help could lead users to subscribe, unsubscribe, review or send email to help-gnu-emacs mailing list, send improvement or enhancement suggestions or anything, similar like GNU Hyperbole is doing it since decades. Survey in the context of the opinion poll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_(human_research)#Opinion_poll The Help menu that would easier enable communication channel with users is necessary. Survey itself is not as much important as the ability or capacity in Emacs development to analyse the data that is already there in public, as I mentioned, bug report database is there, and there are numbers of stars or likes on various public projects, then there are search engines, and various comments of users on other public channels. Subject of stars/likes and considering that users really like something because of number of stars/likes is doubtful. Those who have spent few thousand dollars on advertising of their services or products, they will know why is number of stars/likes doubtful. Example is Spacemacs configuration, I do not know if it is "configuration" or "text editor built on top of Emacs" as it says on Archlinux website: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spacemacs What I may say about that, even if Spacemacs developers did not advertise, they could as well advertise for it and obtain those stars/likes and apparent online popularity. But number of stars does not necessarily mean number of users. Number of users publishing online that they use Spacemacs, does not necessarily mean that is less then number of users who do not use Spacemacs, maybe those groups are not willing to publish their statements, or find it silly, like I do. I find it silly to argue about theming, fonts, but maybe is that exactly what is attracting users, some nice theme, flashy, shiny stuff. That is up to Emacs analysis department (emacs-devel) to accept as challenge. > I've said this before (dunno whether I've proposed a separate `Help' > menu item). We should make `report-emacs-bug' better known as a > recommended way to submit ANY feedback about Emacs. Definitely. > The command name can mislead wrt this role. A > separate `Help' menu item would help (even though > redundant with item `Send Bug Report'). Or change > that item to `Send Feedback or Bug Report'. > > It might also make sense, for discoverability etc., > to add a `send-feedback' alias for `send-bug-report'. That is right. > Well, it doesn't constitute a "survey", but it does correspond to > what RMS, I, and Jean-Louis have emphasized here: getting users to > say, in their own words, what they want and what they do. Let me emphasize again, there is number of users who will never speak in public or publish their opinion, why should they? (as thinking from their view point). In my opinion that is greater number of Emacs users. It has to be taken in consideration if then developers are working only for those who are online louder and more exposed to talk, or if they should be maybe working on some set of principles for general users. Let me give you few practical examples from: https://www.debian.org/users/ There are listed among others, following organizations: * Electronics Research Group, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland * Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland * General Students' Committee (AStA), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany * Athénée Royal de Gembloux, Gembloux, Belgium * Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA * Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, UK * Centro de Comunicación Científica, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina * CEIC, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy * Mexican Space Weather Service (SCiESMEX), Geophysics Institute campus Morelia (IGUM), National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico * COC Araraquara, Brazil * Department of Computer Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India * Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Sistemas Informáticos (Facultad de Informática), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain * Department of Control Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Czech Republic * Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Department of Physics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland * Formation Canadienne, Université Libre de Guinée (UG), Conakry, Republic of Guinea * Genomics Research Group, CRIBI - Università di Padova, Italy * Department of Geological Sciences and Geotechnology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy * Dipartimento di Geoscienze, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy * Nucleo Lab, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia * Department of Physics, Harvard University, USA I am to assume that among those organizations there are many people using Emacs, people of different characteristics, not of those groups who like theming and online popularities, so those people in those organizations, who use Emacs, in my opinion, would be less loud online to promote Emacs in the manner how Doom/Spacemacs or others are doing it. Such people would be impossible to reach by publishing some online survey anywhere, but they could be reached through Help menu. There are various groups of people, now we have groups of people who think that Spacemacs is editor built on top of Emacs, maybe it is true, so it is written, but that group of people is now mentioning "Spacemacs" and not Emacs, so they will even ask classic Emacs questions under Spacemacs subjects online. To introduce those users to Emacs development and helpful mailing lists, such menu Help --> Contact us or Tell us your opinion, would be helpful. But nevertheless Spacemacs as example of online apparent popularity, not the real popularity. What if Spacemacs have employed advertising to reach stars and likes? That is not hard to do. I do not think that Emacs ever advertised as commercial companies are doing it, it is self-advertised and promoted through OS distributions. Real popularity could be somehow obtained if GNU/Linux distributions and BSD and other operating system distributions and Emacs main website would publish their statistics. Real data useful for surveys cannot be accurately obtained by publishing such survey online anywhere else but in Emacs itself, including with email and with the anonymous form submission where no personal user information will be entered. I would even state explicitly that no IP logs will be kept, all would go to /dev/null and systems like captcha would not be necessary, as Emacs could formulate the buffer with the HTML rendered and viewed with eww that already contains inside tokens that will recognize that such form is coming from within Emacs and from nowhere else. Separate form could be made for online public. Summary: - there are different groups of users, in my opinion, development is rather looking onto feedback of those who are more loud online, as those who don't communicate they cannot be reached anyway - those groups of users who are publicly telling about their ideas related to Emacs, may not be, or may be, representative or majority group of users, but myself I doubt they are. Relying that those groups are representative for majority of Emacs users is doubtful as well. - it is better to develop for majority, just as by principle was done for years for and within Emacs, and I would say to skip all the surveys, and to increase the analysis and enhancement capacities. Data is already there as mentioned. - if any survey is done, such survey should target to find out what the majority really wants, in order to bring about more Emacs popularity. But looking into present popular projects, one can easily draw conclusions without vias. - add the button in the Help menu to contact help-gnu-emacs mailing list, subscribe, unsubscribe, send email anyway, or send feedback or send bug report. The "Send bug report" menu could be converted to multi menu doing that feature.