Re: Confused by y-or-n-p

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: rudalics@gmx.at, emacs-devel@gnu.org, juri@linkov.net
> Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:03:00 -0500
> 
>   > > After this is included in a release, we can ask users
>   > > to try the value t for a week or two and tell us whether they like it.
>   > > Then we can tell which default is best.
> 
>                                  Adoption of a new release by users is
>   > very slow; I wouldn't be surprised if a year passed before major
>   > distros made a new release their main one.  E.g., we are still getting
>   > bug reports from people who use Emacs 25 and even 24, let alone 26,
>   > although Emacs 27.1 was released 5 months ago.
> 
> That is true, but it may not be a problem.  To get useful results, we
> don't need most of the community to switch.  It is enough to get
> answers from a variety of users.

Which users should they be, and how do we find them and reach out to
them?

They should definitely be users who have the just-released version
installed, which is why I mentioned the observation that the process
of upgrading to a new version is slow and takes many moons.

> Likewise, we should not be in a hurry about getting the answers.  We
> can wait a few months if necessary while accumulating users'
> responses.

Let's say we have half a dozen of such features, and we need to wait
for the answers for a few months about each one of them.  Who can have
a long enough attention span to manage such a polling system? who can
keep track of all those features even though we could switch branches
and release a couple of versions in-between?  If someone volunteers to
do the job, then I'm okay with trying that, although I'm skeptical as
to success chances.  If no one volunteers, I don't see how we could do
something like that.  We don't even have a forum for conducting such
polls, let alone a tried and working procedure.