Re: package-autosuggest

[Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> - Sophisticated: each hint should have a confidence/certainty indicator,
>>   possibly a symbol among `certain`, `probable`, `possible`.
>
> AFAICT the code would only suggest the use of the external package when
> it's "instead of falling back to `fundamental-mode`", so I think it's
> good enough.

Fair enough.

> Even if it's not the right package, it might help the users realize
> that they should look for an appropriate major mode :-)

That'd indeed already be an improvement, my point is that in some cases
we would know that it really is the right package with very high
certainty.  From a user perspective, if Emacs package suggestions are
sometimes great and sometimes not exactly what they were looking for,
it's natural to take all suggestions with a grain of salt.  Suggestions
with a grain of salt is already a pretty good scenario, of course.  But
if Emacs would have a special message that it displays when it has a
suggestion it's really quite sure about, and those are always right on
the money, then the user can learn to confirm those suggestions more
freely and keep their second thoughts for the other (less certain)
suggestions.  So, my suggestion to keep some more metadata is meant to
allow Emacs to have such distinctions, perhaps not right off the bat.

>> - Manually curated: Emacs should only push suggestions for packages that
>>   the project whole-heartedly recommends.
>
> While the quality of the package matters in a certain sense, in practice
> the choice of what to include in Emacs or (Non)GNU ELPA comes down to
> many other criteria, and there are packages there which I would
> *not* recommend (and definitely not "whole-heartedly").
>
> Instead, I think the criteria should be based on the likelihood that the
> recommendation is helpful.
>

Here I think we mostly agree.  IMO since (Non)GNU ELPA accepts packages
that are possibly somewhat work-in-progress, Emacs probably shouldn't
automatically recommend them to users, so some manual curation would be
needed to guarantee that the recommendation is helpful, as you say.

>
>         Stefan