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

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

Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> writes:

>> The implementation of this survey is insane, and as a result,
>
> Users are discovering (for first time?) features that are on that list
> and reporting issues it.  I have also seen bugs when two different minor
> modes are mixed and matched together.
>
> I have a strong feeling that some of the bug reports are result of this
> survey.

On what evidence, exactly?

>> the wiki page is horribly b0rken. 
>
> I don't think so.

Your methodology resulted in a bunch of modes which are very commonly
used being added automatically to the table with erroneous results
(auto-compression-mode and auto-encryption-mode, for example, are
enabled by default, so I doubt vey much that their usage figure is
really 0!).  This wildly distorted evidence is likely to lead to bad
policymaking over at emacs-devel; the best we can hope for is that it's
simply ignored.

If the purpose is to discover which packages are actually frequently
used (for purposes of deciding what should be enabled by defaullt, for
example), it's generating horribly inaccurate and unreadable data, for
no good reason (report-emacs-bug demonstrates how much of this data is
already available in an automated fashion).  You're bringing some
entirely collateral and until-now-unstated purposes of this survey
without any evidence that it's achieving those aims at all.