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

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > So yes, it works, if the user is reasonably serious about reporting the bug.

Nonetheless, your report shows that the procedure is complex.
(Thanks for the detailed report.)
Some people might be put off by that and might not go through with it.

Can we come up with ways to simplify this in some usual cases?

  > To boost the user’s confidence in being able to send a bug report, it
  > might make sense to detect that Emacs is not configured to send mail
  > earlier, and, at step 1, add a clause to the help message:

  > -      Type C-c C-c to send the bug report.
  > +      Type C-c C-c to send the bug report.  You will be asked
  > +        to enter your mail server settings.

I agree that would be good.

  >  and offers three choices: ‘mail client’
  > (default), ‘transport’, and ‘smtp’.

  > 4. Because I normally use Gmail via its web interface, my mail client
  > is _also_ unconfigured.

Could we make things substantially easier by adding an option 'webmail'?
It might be able to reconize various webmail sites, and DTRT for each one.
Users could implement more of them.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)