Re: Upcoming merge of adaptive-wrap

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> Ah, no. Installing software and browsing packages are both activities
> that most computer users are implicitly familiar with.

Reading is an activity most literate _humans_ are intimately familar
with, but I'll humor you: the package list, in its present state as a
list of compact one-line descriptions, is not the sort of graphical
package manager computer users are well acquainted with.  The search
facilities available in such package managers source their results from
thorough descriptions provided by package authors at the time their
packages are submitted, most unlike our cascade of package names and
keywords.

> People's capabilities are not static, but designing features which
> impose fewer requirements on such is likely to help more people,
> altogether.

We are imposing no new requirements, but providing _new_ and _more
helpful_ venues through which adaptive-wrap might be discovered and
enabled.

> From the menu? Options -> Manage Emacs Packages. Either way, the fact

Why, you have neglected to mention Option -> Line Wrapping in This
Buffer -> Visual Wrap Prefix, complete with a tooltip describing its
function.

> that Emacs does have packages is a widely advertised fact, everywhere
> online.

And why is the fact that Emacs has a manual not suitably advertised?  It
is advertised on the splash screen, literally the first screen presented
to a new Emacs user.

> And once you reach the packages' list, you can search across all of
> them (that appear there) using a uniform approach.

No doubt, it will be an immeasurable relief to our users that the
technique for searching the package list is uniform, despite never
returning satisfactory results.  Over the course of my year-long tenure
as a moderator of an Emacs instant messenger group with roughly 1000
members, not once have I seen the package list credited with the
discovery of a package shared in the group.  Instead, the prevailing
sources for such discoveries, in no particular order, appear to be
Reddit, posts on both popular and obscure blogs with an interest in
Emacs, this list, NEWS, and reading the Emacs manual out of boredom,
while the package list is largely used by users to install packages
shared in the group.

> I'm still unclear on what is missing from the summary, to be honest.
>
> The NEWS entry is more verbose, sure, but that should also apply when
> the user finds a package based on the summary and clicks on it to read
> the full description to verify if that's what they wanted to use.

How about "source code comments", "unbroken appearance", or any of the
myriad of other applications for adaptive-wrap that users might seek
solutions for?