RE: Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > Let users decide.  A simple option takes care of this.
> > ...  I see no reason why we wouldn't want to let users
> > decide, in this regard - whether it's about privacy or
> > any other reason a user might have for her preference.
> 
> It is not that simple. Many big corporates are fighting suites for
> this. FB, Google all take users' consent and then they do all sorts of
> things that the users didn't think they would do.
> 
> "Users' intelligence is very overrated", my opinion.

That doesn't counter the position that users should
be allowed to decide.

That may be an argument for making the default behavior
to be to exclude all, instead of to include all, of the
info that we currently collection in a hard-coded way.

The point is not that Emacs should automatically
collect such info.  The point is to give users an easy
way express their preference.

You are apparently making an argument that users
shouldn't have to do anything to opt out of sending
info.  They should instead need to opt in to sending
any such.  I have no problem with that.

What we do now is include everything by default, and
if a user doesn't want to include some of that then
she needs to explicitly, manually, delete it from
what gets sent.  And she needs to do that each time
she sends a bug report.

The point of my suggestion is to make it easy for a
user to define her own default behavior.  If the
default for that user option should be to send no
information then I'm OK with that too.

> > What's the difficulty or downside to doing this?
> 
> Another, thing is that the current setup makes is really simple for an
> expert user to report bugs. I just run "emacs -Q" and try to reproduce
> the issue and if it exists, I just shoot the mail with just the steps
> to reproduce without worrying about which commit, which packages
> installed,
> etc.

I thought you were making an argument for not just
including all such info.  Now it sounds like you're
arguing the opposite.  I don't see the relation
between the two.  And I don't see what any of what's
been discussed has to do with worrying about which
packages are installed etc.

In any case, any user, including any expert user,
can easily have the same behavior as she has now.
And in the patch I provided that would even be the
default behavior, so the expert user would not need
to change anything.