Re: Character folding in the pretest

[Sacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com>]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

> I think a poll about this would be a good idea. There is enough
> contention about having it as a default that we may prefer to wait,
> especially since it does change the searching behavior that 24.x are
> used to. What's the best method these days for conducting such a poll?
> I wonder if these types of polls is something our community
> ambassador, Sacha, would be willing to take ownership of...

This approach from 2002 (
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-06/msg00170.html ) of
posting a lightly-structured e-mail-based poll so that people could
either share a quick answer or a more nuanced opinion seems to still be
a better way than, say, using a web-based multiple-choice poll.

On-list discussion seems to be slightly more useful than quick off-list
voting, although I think I can handle tallying quick votes sent to an
address off-list if needed.

Polling is a weird thing, anyway. You'll probably mostly hear from
people who feel strongly about it, so I'm not sure how representative
that will be for our user base. There are pretty good arguments on all
sides in the current thread, so I'm not sure if you'll get that much
additional information from a poll.

Still, if someone wants to draft a poll, I can help with the grunt-work
of distributing it (maybe emacs-devel, help-gnu-emacs, emacs-tangents,
Reddit, and Planet Emacsen), tallying the votes, and maybe updating a
proposal page with additional notes (maybe on EmacsWiki).

Sacha