Re: Upcoming merge of adaptive-wrap

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 28/01/2024 11:34, Po Lu wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
> 
>> It's an order of a magnitude more involved than 'M-x list-packages'
>> followed by C-s.
> 
> And installing Emacs was no doubt several orders of magnitude more so.

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

>> Through Google -- maybe.
> 
> This assessment of our users' problem-solving capabilities is not the
> correct attitude to take in developing Emacs, or any software that is
> not expressly designed for such individuals, as from it the logical
> conclusion to draw is that there is no value in documentation itself.

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

> How would they learn of the existence of the package list, for instance,
> or where to click and what to type to display it?

 From the menu? Options -> Manage Emacs Packages. Either way, the fact 
that Emacs does have packages is a widely advertised fact, everywhere 
online.

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

>> Because its title is a good match for whatever the user would search
>> for? What would they search for, BTW?
> 
> The emails in this thread contain every word present in the package list
> summary, so presumably the same words they would search for within the
> package list; but that was meant as a rhetorical statement, not to be
> taken literally.

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.